Absurdity Quote by Michael Dirda

I've read some of Kurt Vonnegut letters from when he was young. He was a prisoner of war, and even when he was in…

— Susan Sarandon

“Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe…

— Edward Abbey

“He had the neurotic's partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light…

— Guy Vanderhaeghe

“In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older,…

— Gustave Flaubert

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what…

— Michael Dirda

“He still had the young person’s predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and…

— Justin Cronin

“The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?”

— Salman Rushdie

“He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or…

— Galt Niederhoffer

“The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Tayari Jones

“His main example was to read like a child--very curiously and carefully ... But with the full intellectual sophistication of a brilliant adult.”

— Daniel Menaker

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics -…

— Michael Dirda