William T. Vollmann Quotes

Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say “girl”? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, you’re a saint or you’re psychotic. If a few things offend you, deal with them — fairly. If you’re often offended by things, you’re probably a self-righteous asshole and it’s too bad you weren’t censored yourself — by your mother in an abortion clinic.

Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking in his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia.

Women are sewers just like we are, the once pure boys recognize with a start; it’s raw sewage that produces fertilization; once you understand that you can be fond of yourself and members of the Opposite Sex, but you can never quite see them again as ice cream bars. I, the author, don’t really mind this, for I love all girls and love to hug and kiss them and cheer them up when they cry, and have them perform all the same services for me; and a woman’s saliva is certainly a miracle, think of all those enzymes and germs; and if I took and wrote the chemicals down on a sheet of paper, all COOOHs and sighs, it would look pretty, just like a face all pretty, like the dear round moon-face of her who loves you or the creamy-freckled skin and blue eyes and heavenly hair of that Irish beauty back in college, so don’t think I’m complaining.

Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information.

Although my work leads me to spend time with Nazi skinheads, diseased street prostitutes and homeless alcoholics, I do not have the strength of character to be a pathologist.

When they’d been children there’d been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don’t think about it, you won’t fall. — That would be a perfect epitaph, thought Tyler malevolently, crushing the space invader raindrops with his windshield wipers.

So you cheat on your wife and you want me to give you a gold star for it, said Domino. Well, mister, I pity your wife and I don’t give a fuck about you. Now I’ve got to go outside for a minute and see a man about a dog. When I come back, if you want a flatback or a blow, you just lay down your money in my hand. But no more of your hypocritical bullshit. Who the hell do you think you are? You’re just a kid in the candy store that can’t decide which kind of liquorice he wants to stuff his face with. Now sit there and shut up.

The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles…

I ask again: - Do we carry our landscapes with us locked in our ice-hearts, and can we fit them over what was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?

I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses.

As for my father, his epoch was the heyday of the Organization Man, and he respected rules, hierarchies and technocratic methods more than he knew; he simply happened to be good enough to make some of the rules.

We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art!

In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine,

Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.

Departing a yard always feels to me somewhat like crossing a bridge over a deep gorge; one commits oneself to someone else’s defense against the void.