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You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

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.
Right
Giving
Would
Editors
Exactly
Hell
Give
Everything

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too.
Kurt Vonnegut
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[People] want to feel superior, so they imagine we're Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The big show is inside my head.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: C-Students from Yale.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
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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I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I hope that my ideas attract a lively dialogue, even if my sentences are simple. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony, too. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
Kurt Vonnegut
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If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too.
Kurt Vonnegut