William T. Vollmann Quotes

Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?

Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.

Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.

When I go train hopping and I look up into the sky, there are always so many more stars than I remember there were.

Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.

The instant people specialize, its in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

[Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.

At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

There are parts of L.A. that feel very, very Mexican, and there are weird little enclaves of Northside in Mexico - Cancún for instance. So what is a border?

The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness.

(Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)

Perhaps Bug and Tony should have been allies. But any successful structure of domination always gets the weak to reject each other.