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It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

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.
Things
Revealing
Educate
Surprising
Characters
Writer
Stage
Confrontations
Jobs
Confrontation
Character
Entertain

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.
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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Make love when you can. It's good for you.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.
Kurt Vonnegut
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When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?
Kurt Vonnegut
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Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd.
Kurt Vonnegut
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How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.
Kurt Vonnegut
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in nonsense is strength
Kurt Vonnegut
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Love may fail, but # courtesy will prevail.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.
Kurt Vonnegut
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... life, by definition, is never still.
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 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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I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I never asked to be born in the first place.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.
Kurt Vonnegut