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This short video is taken from a guest lecture Kurt Vonnegut held at NYU in 1970. Blank on Blank, who created the video, describes the lecture: “In November 1970, Kurt Vonnegut walked into a class room at NYU. He was a guest speaker that day. He’d prepared some handwritten notes on what he wanted to say: there were his thoughts on the art of writing, his childhood, the death of his parents. He jumped from topic to topic as he shuffled through his papers. Sometimes his voice trailed off. He delivered punchlines with perfect timing.”

On writing:

“I’ve heard that a writer is lucky because he cures himself every day with his work. What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won’t know it.”

On the importance of his books:

“How important my books are or anybody’s books are, I don’t know. I don’t think they are terribly important. I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.”

This interview is taken from Blank on Blank, a project meant to “preserve and re-imagine the American interview.” The website features rare interviews from famous speakers, each complete with an illustration to go along with the video. More interviews can be found here.