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
brought chemistry english scientific teacher
I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
extremely younger
Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.
close effective power
Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.
anyone electric job left offered paying west
I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow?
novelists perhaps
I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
anybody consider form government inherent strengths
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.
build hope
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
absence absolutely beginning capture hubble perfect science sent telescope time
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
change itself simply time
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
access boxes century easy knows less life mankind meaning men puzzle within women
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
brothers fraternity infinitely science talent
I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.
closed novel plot system
I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.
family taken though
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.