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
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You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed
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I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.
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One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
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I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
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It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
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I'm wild again, beguiled again, a wimpering, simpering child I am.
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I want to congratulate librarians,...who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
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Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism; Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant; that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.
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I used to be funny, and perhaps I'm not anymore. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I've seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter.
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THE WINNERS ARE AT WAR WITH THE LOSERS, AND THE FIX IS ON. THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE ARE AWFUL.
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a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life
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This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
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Bush used that line recently. I should sue him for plagiarism.
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But doing that job, surviving it, was like getting a Purple Heart. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.