100 Quotes by William T. Vollmann
"I don't believe in a personal god. It's good to give thanks, whether or not there's a god. There's no reason not to live life to the fullest. Morality is all the more important for people who don't expect to get a piece of celestial candy after they die."
"I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can."
"As I get older, I find myself getting angrier and angrier. Doubtless, change itself, not to mention physical decline and inevitable petty tragedies of disappointed expectations, would have made for resentment in any event; but I used to be a passive schoolboy, my negative impulses turned obediently inward."
"My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing."
"Whenever I travel to a poor country, I try to help at least one person. Usually, that person helps me just as much - I can find a local poor person to be my guide or my interpreter. That person makes money from me, I make money from him or her, we both learn about each other. It's an equal win-win relationship."
"I'm still a marginal figure living from book to book, but, as long as I'm producing labour as a good Marxist prole, I guess I'm satisfied."
"When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they'd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping... all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density."
"Whenever we have an opportunity to engage with each other as human beings and to minimize the differences between us based on disparity in resources, then we should do it."
"The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon."