Eight rules for writing fiction:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
– Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.
What’s your favorite quote? Your favorite book? Kurt Vonnegut, you will be missed, but, thankfully, we have your powerful words:
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
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.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
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.
Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
<!– google_ad_client = “pub-9038795104372754″; google_alternate_ad_url = “http://www.brainyquote.com/ads/amazon_square.html”; google_ad_width = 300; google_ad_height = 250; google_ad_format = “300×250_as”; google_ad_type = “text_image”; google_ad_channel =”6085207145″; google_color_border = “FFFFFF”; google_color_link = “0011FF”; google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”; google_color_text = “000000″; google_color_url = “0011FF”; // And, don’t forget his self-composed epitaph:
The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.
Or, as this loyal fan would say: The only proof we need for the existence of God was Kurt Vonnegut’s banned books.
