Don't put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action.

There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.

If Jesus was alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.

I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.

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.

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!