Nothing in this book is true.

Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.

Kurt Vonnegut speaking to John Irving while Irving was administering the Heimlich maneuver in response to Vonnegut's uncontrollable coughing..."John,stop- I am not choking. I have emphysema.

If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.

Of course, socialism is just evil now. It's completely discredited supposedly by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can't help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to Communist China now which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are.

It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next