As half the internet seems to be saying... so it goes.

Nice going, God!

Damn. I was hoping he would live long enough to see my movie adaptation of Galapagos (in another 15-20 years............maybe)

On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I was going to see him give a talk and quite possibly meet him in 3 weeks.

I'm so mad I never got that chance.

He was my favorite author too.

when i was a little kid i spotted on tv this weird-ass movie that i totally loved... it switched from place to place and you could not understand what went on but i did somehow and i loved the music. never had a chance to finish seeing it (was @ my grandmother's house & we had to leave) but it haunted me forever. sure enough it turned out to be slaughterhouse five, and that's how i became interested in his books.

another time i was in this israeli kibbutz and besides the drinking and the making out w/ global girls there was not much going on-- fortunatelly someone had donated a bunch of vonnegut books to their library-- mother night i think was so brilliant, especially when he analyzes the mentality of the american working class vs. the british.

Oh, oh...my heart bleeds! What a torrid time that must have been! How did you ever cope you poor lamb!

Saw that first thing this morning. I didn't realize he was sick to that extent. I saw him on Bill Maher's show last year I think, and didn't seem to be ill.

he had a bad fall a week ago in which he suffered brain injuries. he did not recover from them.
he had tried to killl himself in 1985.
he had to be taken in 2000 to the hospital because of smoke inhalation due to a fire at his townhouse.

When they were inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973, Kurt Vonnegut said of Allen Ginsberg: "I like 'Howl' a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first -- and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that."

...so it goes...

haa hahahahaha

hilarious

That is pretty damned good!

this was by the way my first montana wildhack

now you understand why i was so curious about the book

"Words of wisdom Lloyd.....words-of-wisdom"


Other author's ideas on writing that are really good are Raymond Carver, Hemingway, and Flannery O'Conner. I have those printed out somewhere from my creative writing classes in college.

everything was beautiful and nothing hurt..

we held a wake last night for grand uncle kurt, the salutation for the night was "so it goes" and i did say "kurt is in heaven now..."




.
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i feel sad.. it was great to have him, he'd say something in an interview, we'd know he was there..


god bless you, uncle vonnegut
goodbye, blue monday
hopefully you're
lonesome no more...

• I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resemble solemnity could be restored.
  So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

• My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

I talked to a guy in a bar once that is a writer and had met many of the famous American authors of our time. He said Vonnegut was the only truly funny one. Even the guys that wrote really funny books weren't funny in person, but Vonnegut was. His writing inspired me so much... to write in a style that inspires and reads fast/pleasantly at the same time. Literature wouldn't be the same without him.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares about how we are or what we do. ... Religious skeptics often become very bitter towards the end, as did Mark Twain. ... I know why I will become bitter. I will finally realize that I have had it right all along: that I will not see God, that there is no heaven or Judgement Day.

Here is an old interview with Vonnegut which is an enjoyable read:

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/b...cle2445103.ece

another toothpick.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

I was so looking forward to a new book..
Immortality belongs to no man.

godspeed