Vonnegut QUOTES

1 " The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it. "

― Meena Kandasamy , The Gypsy Goddess

2 " Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him. "

― Edward Abbey , Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

3 " The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near. "

― Philip José Farmer

4 " ... going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight. "

5 " I don’t know’,” he said. “Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage.” And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer.
I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author’s craftsmanship. "

― John William Tuohy , No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care

6 " Edith Vonnegut behaved like a guest in her children's lives. To her way of thinking, parenting came under the general heading of household tasks, which, as a wealthy woman, she could pay others to do. "