Vonnegut Writing Quotes & Sayings

His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.
And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.
At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.
My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

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

This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself behind my leaks.

"I know," I said.

"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.

"I know," I said.

There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.
In the water I am beautiful. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Apology number two: I am sorry for the damage that storytellers have done to the minds of the young. This is not my surrender to the Moral Majority, which burns my books. I will continue in my writing to hint where babies really come from, and that God shouldn't be put in charge of everything until we get to know Him a little better, and that our exalted leaders are just like a lot of nitwits I went to high school with, and that American soldiers have been known to curse when wounded, and so on. I don't apologize for any of that. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician. — Kurt Vonnegut

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears. — Kurt Vonnegut

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don't know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they're through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn't ask to be flowers and I didn't ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five ... I had a shutting-off feeling ... that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK . — Kurt Vonnegut

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. — Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut along with critically acclaimed novelists like Lawrence Durrell and Iris Murdoch, Scholes explained that Vonnegut uses the rhetorical potential of the short sentence and short paragraph better than anyone now writing, often getting a rich comic or dramatic effect by isolating a single sentence in a separate paragraph or excerpting a phrase from context for a bizarre chapter-heading. The apparent simplicity and ordinariness of his writing mask its efficient power ... — Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

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

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

If you can't learn about reading and writing from Kurt, maybe you should be doing something else. — Kurt Vonnegut

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

But that's fetishism, I think, writing books to write books. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer. — Kurt Vonnegut

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it. — Kurt Vonnegut

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career. — Kurt Vonnegut

I've just come back from Vegas, and I was in on the caucus process. It's insane. What a mess. And also with these particular candidates who are running, so many times I said, "I just wish Kurt [Vonnegut] were alive." This is like something he would be writing. This is just crazy stuff. I would love to hear his take on it. — Susan Sarandon

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

Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desk for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it. Interviewers propose to speed up this process
by trepanning writers, so to speak, and fishing around in their brains for unused ideas which otherwise might never get out of there. Not a single idea has ever been discovered by means of this brutal method
and still the trepanning of authors goes on every day.
I now refuse all those who wish to take the top off my skull yet again. 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

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

So many people think that practicing an art is a good way to make a living. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. 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. — Kurt Vonnegut

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.
Quoth Mandarax:
Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!
- GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS — Kurt Vonnegut

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut. — Michael Dirda

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

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

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to
become a professional writer. I say to you, If you really want to hurt your
parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can
do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've
been to college. — Kurt Vonnegut

Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. — Mark Vonnegut

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

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

Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of ... less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
'Think of that. — Kurt Vonnegut

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

You develop a style from writing a lot. — Kurt Vonnegut

The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from eternal grief.
For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.
Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died - to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere. — Kurt Vonnegut

A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

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

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

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.

Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns. — Kurt Vonnegut

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane. — Kurt Vonnegut

She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars. — 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

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

Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time. — Kurt Vonnegut

And Castle nodded sagely. 'So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn't agree more.'
'Do you really agree?' I asked. 'A minute ago you said something about Jesus.'
'Who?' said Castle.
'Jesus Christ?'
'Oh,' said Castle. 'Him.' He shrugged. 'People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.'
'I see.' I knew I wasn't going to have an easy time writing a popular article about him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought and said. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Start [writing] as close to the end as possible. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe. — Kurt Vonnegut

Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

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

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

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

[I write] intuitively, reflexively, as if skiing down a steep mountain slope with no time to think. — Kurt Vonnegut

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done. — Kurt Vonnegut

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed. — Kurt Vonnegut

I consider writing an act of good citizenship. — Kurt Vonnegut