Kurt Vonnegut By Critics Quotes & Sayings

Greeks are born talkers," wrote Harriet. The deputies were no exception, with or without their twirling conversation beads. They seldom used notes, at times she wished they had; a few facts and figures would have been a relief from the sweeping statements. — Mary Allsebrook

I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place. — Kurt Vonnegut

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction. — Kurt Vonnegut

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction. — Michael Dirda

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

I think jokes are a perfectly viable form of literature. Some critics take issue with me because I make my points and discuss my ideas with jokes, rather than with oceanic tragedy. — Kurt Vonnegut

When you play a non-fiction character it is more responsibility than when you are playing a fiction character because that person lived, and you do want to pay respect to that. — Bryan Cranston

Back then, as a kid, you made a choice of who you liked, and it was either us or 'Take That.' And if you liked 'East 17', it showed you knew what was going on, you were clued up, had better taste in music. — Brian Harvey

I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it ... Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you. — Chris Crutcher

Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks show us how to discover the secrets to healing, love, intuition and insight. — Deepak Chopra

Fitness is a luxury when you are busy! — Lauren Conrad

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity. — Rebecca Miller

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human. — Alan Turing

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

Nothing can erase the touch of your love and kindness. — Debasish Mridha

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. — Kurt Vonnegut