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
homes love people
Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
main people replied
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
funny helps
I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.
describe figure human interested mostly people readers somewhere sure writers
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.
chemistry color convinced cornered days firmly god quite scientists
Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.
children country courts divine duties exercise freedom grow guided insist lovely natural policemen prisons seldom taught troubles
What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.
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.
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.
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.
absolutely allowed fear literary members retrospect striking
It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.