Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.was an American author. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth11 November 1922
CountryUnited States of America
character writing roots
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
jesus want messages
If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.
baby be-kind god-bless-you
There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.
running school fire
What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.
survivor never-trust knows
Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived.
people church daydreaming
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
music sex order
What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order."
teacher children pride
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
drinking beer weight-loss
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
gratitude slaughterhouse-five awful
Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.
names wish wish-you
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
firsts judgment born
Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.
art way breakfast-of-champions
The arts are not a way to make a living,
love war winning
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.