Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I'm a writer; it's not just what I do, but who I am.

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

You don't write a book to show off.

There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.

Writing wasn't about making money. I wanted to find fulfillment in writing and telling stories, and that's what's driven me.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.