I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball's chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.
For us the Dresden Dolls were porcelain dolls that were made in that city at the time, that is what they were to us, and also a reference in Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, and in a song by The Fall.
My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut - he's my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don't really remember what we talked about.
I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.
[Kurt] Vonnegut once said, if you ever want to know who somebody is. . . Like you look at Richard Nixon, or Adolf Hitler, or Ralph Nader, or anybody who seems like a difficult person to understand, and is therefore not part of the pattern of human behavior. Think about who they were in high school, and they will explain themselves to you. So we got a hold of, like, 50 high-school yearbooks, including my mom's from 1925 or something, and we discovered that they're all the same.
We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut. '
As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
