Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

What memories for mud to have.

Einstein's E=mc2 is an extraordinary concept. So radical: matter and energy are two phases of the same sort of general stuff. There's only one other idea that radical: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God.

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

In those days great teachers at Shortridge [High School] were celebrities. I would look up to them.

I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable.

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

I love you, Eliza,” I said. She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.” “Why not?” I said. “It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?

I myself grew up when radio was very important. I'd come home from school and turn on the radio. There were funny comedians and wonderful music, and there were plays. I used to pass time with radio.

the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.

Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.

I'm a painter in my dreams, you know.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.

The name of the new religion," said Rumfoord, "is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

I think... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.'

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.

The moral of the story is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

kar.a.bek.i.an (n.); (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th Cent. painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both.

Nothing in this book is true.

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy - because we're experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that's what's going on now.

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.

I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on.

All this happened, more or less.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

My special situation was that I was the son and grandson of architects. And so I saw building. We were building the city, and that was exciting.

You are better than you think.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

One of the things I'm going to say out there is how grateful I am - and how grateful the world is - for the tremendous gift of the black people, of jazz.

Roses are red, And ready for plucking, You're sixteen, And ready for high school.

People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We're behaving abominably. It's like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, "I think Uncle Charlie's off his rocker." We are behaving in a bizarre manner.

There is a strong feeling in the Middle West that the artist is not pulling his own weight no matter how hard he may work, that the other people are doing the real stuff.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.