He will not hate. He will not kill. There’s hope in that. There’s no hope in war.

they make you think, raise your spirits, evoke your anger at injustice, make you see things in new ways, question society’s “accepted wisdom,” and, always, entertain. Vonnegut’s heroes included the

His children were all grown and had left home, and he left the marriage of nearly a quarter century that he had expressed problems about in a letter to Knox Burger when he was teaching in Iowa (“Something telepathic has busted between us”).

Unsettling business for an artist, where everything that happens in New York has universality, and everything that happens outside is ethnography.

When I heard about Markson getting $75,000, everything went white. People shouldn’t talk to me about money.

I write with a big black crayon, you know, grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist. You’re more of an impressionist. If you want to kind of try what I do, take life seriously but none of the people in it.

It’s about how a story-teller, any good story-teller anywhere, works.

am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes—but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then pe

that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them.