"Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be……" — William T. Vollmann
"Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?"
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William T. Vollmann
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26 Quotes by William T. Vollmann
William T. Vollmann has 26 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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It will be fun to give some to prostitutes,
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I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a…
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Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.
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Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?
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I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my…
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If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds…
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So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more…
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I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this…
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Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.
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Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe…
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Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.
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Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say “girl”? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, you’re…
See all 26 quotes by William T. Vollmann »
More Across Quotes
This quote is filed under Across Quotes,
one of 3,257 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
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I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody…
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As freedom-loving people across the globe hope for an end to tyranny, we will never forget the enormous suffering of…
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse…
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Philately is normally a boys' hobby but for some reason it was in vogue at my junior school. Between the…
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
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But it's not just the cattle producers, it's all the attendant industries like transport and shipping and feed producers and…
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