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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
Jr.
Writing
Students
Something
Teach
Make
Creative
Would
Tell
Away
Used
Character
Right
Characters

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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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.
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in nonsense is strength
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I didn't know then what a sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. My boy, he said, you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles-- champions every one.
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Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.
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In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.
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Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
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Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived.
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Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better than no drugs at all.
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If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke.
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I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
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Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
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.
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There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I love you, because the love you gave me was the only love I've ever had, the only love I ever will have
Kurt Vonnegut
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The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.
Kurt Vonnegut
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the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
Kurt Vonnegut
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My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.
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If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
Kurt Vonnegut