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

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.
Kurt Vonnegut
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People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.
Kurt Vonnegut
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On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar.
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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I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver. I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.
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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There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Love may fail, but # courtesy will prevail.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.
Kurt Vonnegut
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...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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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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How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Hitler at the end thought that he himself was one more casualty in the war.
Kurt Vonnegut