Sublime

I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away.

Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” Rule #2: Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.324

I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers’ retreat Xanadu, what he’d done during the war, which he called “civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.”

He told us that one reason he and his friends wanted to start the commune and learn to “live off the land” in a simple way was that “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut said, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?” In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. • • • I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

and so on,

and so on,