. . . But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. “Oh, yes,” he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. “I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?” “Lung cancer?” I offer.
“No. No. Because I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, ‘Colon.'”. . . .
From an article last August in Rolling Stone