William T. Vollmann Quotes

I do not want my new works to be generated in a market or audience of any kind.

You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.

I have never written out of a desire to be controversial.

I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.

I've lost so many gigs composing commercial or television music because I can't repress my inclination to work against conventions.

Creating music based on art and giving away from your spirit is more important than making a living.

I don't want to be 'Halsey: America's Sweetheart,' or 'Halsey: Bad Girl.' If you can sum up my career in a clickbait headline, I've done something wrong.

If you don't compromise your gift, if you write each day as well as you can, and then submit your work and not worry about it and go on to the next piece, you suddenly find oddly enough that you're no more interested in the applause than the silence. You don't hear either one of them. You can never listen to the naysayers. If you do you won't survive.

Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.

I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would have never written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker never would have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do.

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

I'm sure at one point I will do some acting again, but it would have to be the right thing. I'm not going to do it just because people are offering it to me. Not for those box-office, bullshit, money, noncreative people. But I'll do it when it's right to do it.

I don't care how you photograph - use the kitchen mop if you must, but if the product is not true to the laws of photography... you have produced something that is dead. (1923)

I never pigeonholed myself - the only reason you'd want to pigeonhole is to monetize your business and, as a person, I don't see the importance of doing that. My music took off above the rest of those things: You can just make a song, put it on a CD, and get it out to all these people.

There's nothing worse than the frustration of having somebody who you feel doesn't get what you're doing, trying to turn it into something else. It's a very, very annoying and sort of frustrating thing and I just never wanted to go through it. I was very fortunate as I came up through the film business that I was able to insulate myself from that.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

Doing a film and saying, I've done a really dark film and now I have to do a comedy... That's not me. If a script comes along and it's dark I'll absolutely do it and take the consequences. I'm not fussed about the image that goes along with it.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

In music industry they always want you to write something like the one that was popular. And that's something you kind of have to just - sometimes you just say yes to people, like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure," and then you just write the one you want to write.

For me able to do the records I want to do and not have to worry about this producer or that producer or that trend, I'm not really interested in that.

I think I'm pretty committed to staying. I'm not committed to not doing big movies, but I am committed to continuing to make smaller movies, not for the sake of making smaller movies, but because I think it's really invigorating to just go work with people and know that it might be awful.

[People] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. ... Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.

If you chase the art, you really can't fail because you'll always be able to look at yourself in the mirror. And that's not about making angry decisions, either, it's about always doing the right thing for you, your fans and your art.

The world thinks that music is a commercial commodity. I'm glad that is not my code.