Top 59 Quotes About Vonnegut Writing
#1. I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
Kurt Vonnegut
#2. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sakes. Now, I mean, I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend
a lousy poem.
Kurt Vonnegut
#3. Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.
Kurt Vonnegut
#4. I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.
Kurt Vonnegut
#5. 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
#6. The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:
ETC.
Kurt Vonnegut
#7. My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
Kurt Vonnegut
#8. 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
#9. The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.
Kurt Vonnegut
#10. Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.
Kurt Vonnegut
#12. The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.
Kurt Vonnegut
#13. The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service
Mark Vonnegut
#14. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985)
Kurt Vonnegut
#15. Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.
Kurt Vonnegut
#16. I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
Kurt Vonnegut
#17. It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
Kurt Vonnegut
#18. Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.
Kurt Vonnegut
#19. [I write] intuitively, reflexively, as if skiing down a steep mountain slope with no time to think.
Kurt Vonnegut
#20. Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.
Kurt Vonnegut
#21. That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.
Mark Vonnegut
#23. Start [writing] as close to the end as possible.
Kurt Vonnegut
#24. We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Kurt Vonnegut
#25. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them
in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
[From the preface.]
Kurt Vonnegut
#26. 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
#27. I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. Jesus
if Kilgore Trout could only write! Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.
Kurt Vonnegut
#29. Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?
Kurt Vonnegut
#30. The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.
Kurt Vonnegut
#31. But that's fetishism, I think, writing books to write books.
Kurt Vonnegut
#32. I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.
Kurt Vonnegut
#33. You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#34. 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
#35. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#36. Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
Mark Vonnegut
#37. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Kurt Vonnegut
#38. 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
#39. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#40. If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
#42. Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. If you can't learn about reading and writing from Kurt, maybe you should be doing something else.
Kurt Vonnegut
#44. We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. I consider writing an act of good citizenship.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?
Kurt Vonnegut
#47. 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
#48. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#49. She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars.
Kurt Vonnegut
#50. This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
Kurt Vonnegut
#51. Is it an anti-war book?" "Yes," I said. "I guess." "You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?" "No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?
Kurt Vonnegut
#52. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.
Mark Vonnegut
#54. I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.
Kurt Vonnegut
#55. People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.
Kurt Vonnegut
#56. As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.
Kurt Vonnegut
#58. Being a journalist influenced me as a novelist. I mean, a lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.
Kurt Vonnegut
#59. What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.
Kurt Vonnegut
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