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Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

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.
Giving
Information
Heck
Writing
Possible
Suspense
Going
Understanding
Finish
Much
Story
Readers
Lasts
Complete
Last
Pages
Stories
Soon
Give
Reader
Cockroaches

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.
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Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
Kurt Vonnegut
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there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?
Kurt Vonnegut
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Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
Kurt Vonnegut
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- Why me? - That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? - Yes. - Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut
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It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The hopes and fears of all our years are here with us tonight.
Kurt Vonnegut
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A nice thing about war-not that anything about war is nice, I guess-is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We are what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut
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When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, It is done. People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.
Kurt Vonnegut