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When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.

Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 11
Died: 2007
Died: April 14
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Kurt Vonnegut
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Something
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Make
Creative
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Away
Used
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It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.
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Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.
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We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.
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Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did 'Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did -' Et cetera. -NOBLE CLAGGETT (1947-1966)
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Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what.
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The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
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People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We're behaving abominably. It's like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, I think Uncle Charlie's off his rocker. We are behaving in a bizarre manner.
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kar.a.bek.i.an (n.) (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th Cent. painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both.
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If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!
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I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.
Kurt Vonnegut
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egregious. most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. it has a much more interesting story than that to tell. it means outside the herd. imagine that - thousands of people, outside the herd.
Kurt Vonnegut
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One thing I found out was that we need extended families. We need gangs. And, of course, if they're tribes and clans and so forth have been dispersed by the industrial revolution by people looking for work wherever they can find it. And a nuclear family, a man, a woman and kids and a dog and cat is no survival scheme at all. Horribly vulnerable.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life.
Kurt Vonnegut
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One of [ways being lucky] was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Kurt Vonnegut
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... life, by definition, is never still.
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Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
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When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
Kurt Vonnegut