Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.

Kurt Vonnegut

• Literature
• Arabic

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

  

  A. B. Yehoshua
  • Literature
  • Understand
  • Gold

• What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

  

  E. M. Forster
  • Great
  • Man
  • Literature

• Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

  

  Tayari Jones
  • Literature
  • Secret
  • Western

• I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

  

  V. S. Naipaul
  • Friends
  • Man
  • Nice

• The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

  

  Tayari Jones
  • American
  • Literature

• Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

  

  Edmund White
  • Political
  • Community
  • Body

• Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

  

  Carl Clinton Van Doren
  • Service
  • Literature
  • Adventure

• As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

  

  Nathaniel Philbrick
  • History
  • Always
  • English

• The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

  

  Nathan Myhrvold
  • Great
  • Girl
  • Boy

• I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.

  

  J. M. G. Le Clezio
  • Feeling
  • Small
  • Me

• There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Mind
  • Culture
  • Strong

• I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

  

  E. B. White
  • Know
  • Literature
  • More

• I believe love at first sight is possible. Centuries of literature and art and beauty has been dedicated to that idea, so who am I to argue, even if I've never experienced it?

  

  Maggie Grace
  • Believe
  • Love
  • For Him

• Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.

  

  Harrison Salisbury
  • Language
  • Literature
  • Economics

• Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.

  

  Karl Ove Knausgaard
  • Life
  • Literature
  • Changes

• If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

  

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Different
  • School
  • You

• Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.

  

  Frances McDormand
  • Kind
  • Film
  • Literature

• Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

  

  Karen Thompson Walker
  • Life
  • Great
  • Important

• We can demonstrate, by our own example, how E.U. freedoms, including the freedom of nationals of other E.U. countries to come and work here, has enabled us to expand our economy.

  

  John Bruton
  • Work
  • Freedom

• Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt - that is, they shared - all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.

  

  Octavia E. Butler
  • People
  • Pain
  • Thought

• The law serves of nought else in these days but for to do wrong, for nothing is spread almost but false matters by color of the law for reward, dread and favor and so no remedy is had in the Court of Equity in any way.

  

  Jack Cade
  • Law
  • Color
  • Equity

• Imma, blunt blowin, polo draws showin, I don't give a lovely mothafuck ass nigga.

  

  Lil Wayne

• Football is the No. 1 sport in America.

  

  Michael Ovitz
  • America
  • Football
  • Sports

• Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.

  

  Kurt Vonnegut
  • Literature
  • Arabic