Well, we are terribly divided politically, yes, and, you know, I don't mean to intimidate you and your listeners but I have a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.
Kurt VonnegutThe smartest people in Indianapolis became teachers [during the Great Depression]. And, for once, there was something for women to do because teaching was regarded as a woman's profession, like nursing. So the smartest women in town - Jesus, my women teachers were so exciting.
Kurt VonnegutIf 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.
Kurt VonnegutPerhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.
Kurt VonnegutI can see where influential people would like Maharishi better than Jesus. My God, if the Beatles and Mia Farrow went to Jesus, He'd tell them to give all their money away.
Kurt VonnegutThere is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End.
Kurt VonnegutI just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble.
Kurt VonnegutThat speci๏ฌc remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.
Kurt VonnegutYou say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.
Kurt VonnegutGeorge W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.
Kurt VonnegutYou can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
Kurt VonnegutMy own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
Kurt VonnegutOur president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
Kurt VonnegutFuture generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.
Kurt VonnegutWhen the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here.
Kurt VonnegutThanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Kurt VonnegutGod Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!
Kurt VonnegutThinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
Kurt VonnegutAll the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Kurt VonnegutSeems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.
Kurt VonnegutThe trouble with being a secular humanist is that we don't have a congregation. We don't meet so it's a very flimsy tribe, but there's a wonderful quotation from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism. Something perfectly is going on. I do not doubt it, but the explanations I hear do not satisfy me.
Kurt VonnegutPractice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.
Kurt VonnegutWhat we will be seeking... for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.
Kurt VonnegutI have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes.
Kurt VonnegutI have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
Kurt VonnegutWhen a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed
Kurt VonnegutI don't know what anybody else in the world would want to thank America for, but man, it [jazz] works. What I like about it - and what public health people ought to like about it - it's safe sex.
Kurt Vonnegut"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
Kurt VonnegutThe only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.
Kurt VonnegutGenerally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.
Kurt Vonnegut