Biography

Ex-father-in-law of Geraldo Rivera.

He considered abandoning writing and taking a teaching job, and then "Cat's Cradle'' became a best-selling novel. He therefore did not abandon writing.

He started writing when he was in his mid-twenties.

Some of his novels were banned & also burned for suspected obscenity.

Kurt Vonnegut has been referred to in numerous teen-themed movies: in Footloose (1984), Kevin Bacon argues the merits of the novel "Slaughterhouse Five" with the town minister; in Varsity Blues (1999), James Van Der Beek (as a high-school backup QB) reads "Slaughterhouse Five" instead of his team's play-book; James Marsden discovers William Sadler's supposedly retarded janitor reading "Slaughterhouse Five" in Disturbing Behavior (1998); Can't Hardly Wait (1998) ends with Ethan Embry going to Chicago for a writing course, headed by Kurt Vonnegut.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I had nothing to do with the script of Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), incidentally. That was the work of Stephen Geller -- and a good job it was. I didn't meet him until after the picture opened. He is a novelist, too, and I asked him which he liked best, writing novels or screenplays. He preferred novels by far, since they were wholly under his control.

A nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

When [Ernest Hemingway] killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon.

If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.