William T. Vollmann Quotes

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

I just don't think I'm very good at fiction.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.