Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

The key word about The West Wing is show. It is not a reality show. It has nothing to do with reality.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'

Two things I do well in books are sex and violence, but I don't want gratuitous sex or violence. The sex and violence are only as graphic as need be. And never included unless it furthers the plot or character development.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story.

I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.