Vonnegut

"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."
-Kurt Vonnegut

Reading Bluebeard was one of the great pleasures of my life. Slight really, and not nearly as visionary as some of his other books, it carried a grace through it that I thought the author might have if you happened to catch him, on a nice day, with some time to kill. It was a book, in the end, on the virture of kindness, among many other things you could say about it.

Slaugherhouse-Five is something beautiful. It insists, like the best of Twain, on a moral order founded on the ability to scorn what a particular culture might, at any one time, hold up as an ideal of itself.

There was no pretense about Vonnegut. He wrote urgently and without the stink of academe. He had no use, as Orwell didn't, of any words that sought to do anything else than tell exact things. If one loses that exactitude, it becomes too easy to lie, or to say easy things.

Vonnegut never did that. He was brilliant and generous.