I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

If it weren't for the people always getting tangled up with the machinery... Earth would be an engineer's paradise.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.