Remembering Kurt Vonnegut on his birthday 🎂
📷 Inge Morath, 1986
"He laughed a lot and was kind to everyone."
- Dan Wakefield
Jill Krementz took this picture of herself & her husband Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt and me at the end of the evening.
In Kurt’s words: ”When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”
Kurt Vonnegut
"I would just as soon have skipped it all", 2006
@smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Kurt Vonnegut by Gil Friedberg for Life magazine, 1969
"I let the dog out, or I let him in, & we talk some. I let him know I like him, & he lets me know he likes me."
Kurt Vonnegut, hard at work in a typical Jill Krementz author shot. Vonnegut & Krementz were married from 1979 until his death in 2007. This was the photo the @NYTimes used in Vonnegut's obituary.
He called her "Jillio".
From Kurt Vonnegut's interview @ParisReview, 1977
INTERVIEWER
There were some bad reviews?
VONNEGUT
Only in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books, The Village Voice & Rolling Stone. They loved me in Medicine Hat.
#YXH
Kurt Vonnegut with the cast of his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June
📷 Jack Mitchell, 1970
"The bicycle was so full of magic & innocence, hiding there. It might have been a unicorn."
- Kurt Vonnegut
📷 Herbert List, Hamburg, 1930
Kurt Vonnegut by Ulf Andersen, 1988
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer & cold in the winter. It’s round & wet & crowded. At the outside, you’ve got about 100 years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you’ve got to be kind'."
Kurt Vonnegut by Santi Visalli, 1972
"For a book about surviving a massacre, Slaughterhouse-Five makes you laugh an unreasonable amount. Not least through the repetition of three short words that have inspired a thousand bad tattoos: 'So it goes'."
- @MBJack
Kurt Vonnegut by Douglas Elbinger, 1992
"Vonnegut managed to combine an exceptional humanity with a remarkably blasé pessimism, & presented his despair at human life in such engagingly simple terms that even Charlie Brown would have found it persuasive."
- Phil Baker
Kurt Vonnegut by David Levine, 1976
@smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
"His sheer amiability could light up all the cathedrals in America."
- J. G. Ballard
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