Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

It’s terribly important to write your own history before the historians get a crack at it.

You can tell so many facts that you never get to the truth

What is truth? What is a true story? Who is telling the truth, and what is truth in this world today?

Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.

If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

The whole thing with the Rick James story sketch and the Prince story sketch - I recounted my past, you know? - and that's what I was doing. It's not like I sat down and said I want to come up with a great story about Rick James. That stuff really happened.

Historical fiction was not - and is not - meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote 'War and Peace' to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

there is no truly honest autobiography.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

Your version of the truth is all that matters.