Kurt Vonnegut Quote
Young Castle called me Scoop. Good Morning, Scoop. What's new in the word game?I might ask the same of you, I replied.I'm thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.Or the college professors.Or the college professors, I agreed. I shook my head. No, I don't think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.I just can't help thinking what a real shake up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems...And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies? I demanded.They'd die more like mad dogs, I think--snarling & snapping at each other & biting their own tails.I turned to Castle the elder. Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolation of literature?In one of two ways, he said, petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.Neither one very pleasant, I expect, I suggested.No, said Castle the elder. For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!
Young Castle called me Scoop. Good Morning, Scoop. What's new in the word game?I might ask the same of you, I replied.I'm thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.Or the college professors.Or the college professors, I agreed. I shook my head. No, I don't think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.I just can't help thinking what a real shake up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems...And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies? I demanded.They'd die more like mad dogs, I think--snarling & snapping at each other & biting their own tails.I turned to Castle the elder. Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolation of literature?In one of two ways, he said, petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.Neither one very pleasant, I expect, I suggested.No, said Castle the elder. For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!
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About Kurt Vonnegut
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau.
Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. It received positive reviews yet sold poorly. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several well regarded novels including two—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—that were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, in 1968.
Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Its anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amid the Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. It rose to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and made Vonnegut famous. Later in his career, Vonnegut published autobiographical essays and short-story collections such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). He has been hailed for his dark humor commentary on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction.