“The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness.” WritingFormDarkness184 Book:Poor People Source: Poor People
“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.” IfsWritingYearsCharacterMightAbleSexImagineHavensDetailsInstanceInterviews Author:William T. Vollmann
“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.” ThinkingKnowsFeelsWritingYearsEnoughFictionReadyBordersNonfictionWriting Nonfiction Author:William T. Vollmann
“[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.” IfsThinkingKnowsWantWritingSaidCan Do Author:William T. Vollmann
“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.” IfsThinkingWantWritingHumansEasyCan DoHuman BeingsFailingProjectsOur FamilyPersonal Experiences Author:William T. Vollmann
“If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.” IfsKnowsWritingI CanMatterSubjectsSufficientApologyCravingAdvertisementsForbearance Book:Butterfly Stories: A Novel Source: Butterfly Stories: A Novel
“I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.” ThinkingWorldWayWantFeelsWritingLooksKindIdeasRealBigsSeemsReadingLiteratureGamesLanguageNiceShapesAppealsSincereAnother WayReading And WritingComparative LiteratureStructuralism Author:William T. Vollmann
