Latest William T. Vollmann Quotes from Interviews

• Some friends and I, we went right up there behind the studio and we got on a train, we could tell it was going to go to Roseville. We got off it and got on another train. And we got to Roseville, and it takes hours to get through that yard. It's really big. So we ended up just coming back here. It's like fishing or hunting. You can't always come back with something.

  William T. Vollmann

  Hunting, Fishing, Yards

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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

  William T. Vollmann

  Stars, Sky, Looks

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• I think that we're all, as human beings, so limited. If we want to write about ourselves, that's fairly easy. And if we write about our friends or our families, we can do that. But if we want to project ourselves somewhere beyond our personal experience we're going to fail unless we get that experience or we borrow it from others.

  William T. Vollmann

  Writing, Thinking, Want

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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

  William T. Vollmann

  Successful, Fiction, Flaws

• [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.

  William T. Vollmann

  Writing, Thinking, Want

• 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.

  William T. Vollmann

  Writing, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Whereas if I want to create a prostitute character now from memories of different prostitutes and inventing stuff, I can say, "this could happen," "this is quite plausible." But I don't feel I know enough about border life to do the latter.

  William T. Vollmann

  Memories, Character, Different

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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.

  William T. Vollmann

  Book, Way, Remember

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• You could imagine writing about a prostitute, for instance, but if you haven't spent time with prostitutes then you're going to get all these details wrong. But if you have a lot of sex with prostitutes and you're friends with prostitutes and you interview prostitutes, then maybe after many, many years you might be able to create prostitute characters.

  William T. Vollmann

  Sex, Writing, Character

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• We're living in what used to be Mexico, and there's this very fluid border feeling. You go a little bit south of Tijuana, for instance, into Ensenada, and it still seems kind of borderlike. And you go much farther, suddenly the prices are lower, the prostitution is different, the commerce is different, everything feels more "Mexican."

  William T. Vollmann

  Mexican, Feelings, Different

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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?

  William T. Vollmann

  Mexican, Borders, Mexico

• I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling.

  William T. Vollmann

  California, Feelings, Borders