On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.