Sherman Alexie, novelist, poet, lives in Seattle: “I’ve been thinking and talking about him a ton in the last month or so, because my new novel is directly influenced by Slaughterhouse-Five and I’ve been getting some scathing reviews. My publisher, Morgan Entrekin, was giving me a pep talk yesterday and he mentioned that Slaughterhouse was savaged upon publication (I hadn’t known that Morgan, as a young pup, edited Slaughterhouse), that Vonnegut’s mix of sci-fi time travel and moralism was pummeled. So I looked up the New York Times Book Review of Slaughterhouse-Five and was stunned by its absolute condescension. And I thought, ‘Jeez, if Slaughterhouse-Five can be treated that way, then my own meager novel has no chance.’ So I was feeling, if not vindicated, then at least relieved. And then, this morning, I walked down the stairs to my wife’s stunned expression. ‘Kurt Vonnegut died today,’ she said. I mean, jeez, every conversation in my house for 10 days has revolved around Vonnegut and now this. I was sad for the man, for his friends and family (I’d never met him), and sad for the literary world. What I will miss in his ability to laugh at everything, to mock all conventions, and most tellingly, to see the madness in both sides of any conflict, any war. I know we certainly need a Vonnegut novel to explain Iraq, and we won’t get it. A fucking madman suicide bomber just exploded the Iraqi parliment, and I thought, ‘And so it goes.’ In my imaginary graveyard, Vonnegut’s tombstone reads, ‘And so it goes.’ I mean, for the first half-dozen books of his career, Vonnegut was ignored. Then he was a huge figure for around 15 years, and then he was ignored again. We should have never let him go… I’ll never let him go… Man, he lived a great and painful and long and glorious life. Good for him. Good for us. And let us keep talking about him for weeks. Let’s sing a thousand songs to mark his passing.”

Jonathan Raban, novelist, political and cultural critic, lives in Seattle: “Breakfasting at a town in Utah named Hurricane. Unrepentant chain smokers who die at 84 deserve a toast, and I hereby raise a glass of Laphroaig to Vonnegut’s memory, and I’d light up a cigar if we weren’t stuck in a non-smoking room in Eureka, NV right now. Nevada/Arizona have amazingly powerful NPR stations that seem to reach everywhere, and this afternoon I was driving through snow over sagebrush red desert when I picked up Vonnegut reading—a little haltingly, and very touchingly—from Slaughterhouse-Five. Wished that [my daughter] Julia had heard of—let alone actually read—him.”

George Saunders, fiction writer, lives in upstate New York: “Just sitting right here at this computer. Very sad, very proud that we had such a great writer at all, you know? He was The Man, for sure.”

Sarah Vowell, author, NPR star, lives in New York: “Talking on the phone after a flight from Pittsburgh. Those are always the best deaths—the ones of oldsters who had a good run and left behind things to be proud of.”

More responses from other writers and artists here and here.