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A Bit of Fry and Laurie: The understanding Barman.

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Í innganginum að smásagnasafninu Armageddon in Retrospect eftir Kurt Vonnegut, en sonur hans, barnalæknirinn Mark Vonnegut skrifaði innganginn, rakst ég á þessa skemmtilega sögu af Kurt Vonnegut:

"When I was sixteen, he couldn't get a job teaching English at Cape Cod Community College. My mother claimed that she went into bookstores and ordered his books under a false name so the books would at least be in the stores and maybe someone would buy them. Five years later he published Slaughterhouse-Five and had a million-dollar multibook contract. It took some getting used to. Now, for most people looking back, Kurt's being a successful, even famous, writer is an "of course" kind of thing. For me it looks like something that very easily might have not happened.

He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again."