Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
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
Image
If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
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
Image
Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Make love when you can. It's good for you.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Hitler at the end thought that he himself was one more casualty in the war.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
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
Image
There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
You should be careful about who you pretend to be, because who you pretend to be - is actually who you are!
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
Kurt Vonnegut