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One man said he never finished things. He promised he’d teach the group how to do that the following Wednesday. When Wednesday came, he had dropped out of the workshop.
When I teach—and I’ve taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for a couple of years, at City College, Harvard—I’m not looking for people who want to be writers. I’m looking for people who are passionate, who care terribly about something. —kurt vonnegut, Like Shaking Hands with God
It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Vonnegut criticized lit critics too. They wrote “rococo argle-bargle,” he once said.
If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.16 If you have a tendency to blather or croon or lavish on the detail, one way to handle those impulses is to go right ahead—prattle, garnish and glitter. Rather than strangle the inclinations, curbing the flow and squelching the possibility of unearthing the diamonds that might result, scratch out the excess after your first draft’s wanderings and flourishes.
Uncluttered by distracting riffraff, fewer words, when accurate, pack more punch.
It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know.…
“Oh no. Don’t get the wrong idea here. You’ll never make a living at being a writer. Hell you may even die trying. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write. You should write for the same reasons you should take dancing lessons. For the same reason you should learn what fork to use at a fancy dinner. For the same reason you need to see the world. It’s about grace.”106
Bill Gates says, “Wait till you can see what your computer can become.” But it’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.107
A painter friend, James Brooks, told me last summer, “I put the first brush stroke on the canvas. After that, it is up to the canvas to do at least half the work.”
“Give a man a mask,” Oscar Wilde said, “and he will tell the truth.”
He said, ‘This young Captain I’m bringing home—he despises art. Can you imagine? Despises it—and yet he does it in such a way that I can’t help loving him for it. What he’s saying, I think, is that art has failed him, which, I must admit, is a very fair thing for a man who has bayoneted a fourteen-year-old boy in the line of duty to say.’”
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
The most dangerous thing they found on his person was a two-inch pencil stub.162
I wanted their brains to cook and cook with music, with the lid on tight.
us.Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.
Ask any artist, anyone accomplishing anything of value: patience, perseverance, and work, those humble virtues, rate at least as high as talent on the list of necessary equipment, any day.
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.
“Good Taste will put you out of business,” [Vonnegut] declared.…
You have to play by the rules of the game of fiction well enough so that you can get across what is in the rag-and-bone shop of your heart. You have to be like a magician or pickpocket, distracting the audience by entertaining, while you are really saying those things you most want to say.
We must acknowledge that the reader is doing something quite difficult for him, and the reason you don’t change point of view too often is so he won’t get lost; and the reason you paragraph often is so that his eyes won’t get tired, is so you get him without him knowing it by making his job easy for him. He has to restage your show in his head—costume and light it. His job is not easy.
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.275
When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past.… All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.…
Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do.
All jobs are gold mines for fiction.
No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.493
The gift of time is no joke. It matters. But the use and quality of the time matters more.
Whatever writing you do increases your skill in tangling with words.
Moxie will open doors.499
Publishers are in business. They want their business to thrive. They are not going to publish something they don’t think will sell or have some future promise, or that will damage their reputations.
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
Writing means working in solitude, sitting still day after day.
‘When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.’)”
“There’s nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter, open a vein, and bleed.”
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
He said that he fell in love several times, but that nobody would fall in love with him.
