“going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.”

“What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.”

“For example, if she joined the book club — there was always a book club — and hung out with them, her choice of guys would be limited to the dark and moody Chuck Palahniuk/Kurt Vonnegut/Life-Sucks-and-Then-You-Die brooders.”

“Kurt Vonnegut speaking to John Irving while Irving was administering the Heimlich maneuver in response to Vonnegut's uncontrollable coughing..."John,stop- I am not choking. I have emphysema.”

“[...] as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships.”

“The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.”