When I'm dying, I want to think I did what I felt was best for the words I was writing. This may mean, at any time, that I won't be publishable anymore.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of staying true to one's artistic vision, even at the cost of popularity or commercial success.
William T. Vollmann's quote reflects a deep commitment to the integrity of one's creative work. He expresses a desire to remain faithful to his own beliefs and instincts while writing, suggesting that the value of art lies not in its marketability but in its authenticity. This perspective champions the idea that an artist should prioritize their personal truth over societal expectations or commercial pressures, even if it leads to being unpublishable at times.
In practice
In a writing workshop discussing the importance of authenticity in storytelling.
There have been times when I'm writing about things that are personally embarrassing. Like any human being, sometimes I can't help but wonder - 'What are the people I know going to think about this?' So I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space.
Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly.
Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.
The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.
That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
I think it's our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we're able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn's case, we as artists somehow made it 'cool' enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.
For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.
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