''Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.''

"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.
"I know," I said.

— From Vonnegut's self-reflexive Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut, known for his works — Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions — that melded satire, black humor, political commentary, and science fiction died yesterday at the age of 84.

''He was sort of like nobody else,'' said Gore Vidal [. . .]
''He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull.''

NY Times: Counterculture, Dies at 84