Often, his work is a dialogue with violence. Near the end of the story, he let them read the in-progress work to check its accuracy. They weren't bad people, for the most part. Some of them did bad things. If you just say they do bad things, that doesn't really let you understand them.
Every person deserves to be respected and be listened to and understood.
I don't care whether he's Jesus Christ or Hitler. And, chances are, if we could meet both of those guys right here and sit them side by side and talk to them, we might think that maybe Jesus wasn't as impressive as he was cracked up to be and maybe Hitler wasn't a hundred percent evil either, because it's hard to imagine somebody being one hundred percent one way or another. After our interview I went with Vollmann to the Uptown bookstore, Dreamhaven, where he bought two books on bondage. Later, I took him for a drive through South Minneapolis, showing him the action on East Lake Street.