Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for an Edenic continent stretching forever in all directions. Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.

Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

Out in the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nation functionaries and diplomats!

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

Live while you live, when you're dead you're dead.

One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren't a way to make a living.

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit.....when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.

It is never a mistake to say good-bye.

You are reading a bold and universal headline which says ,’I am here, I am here, I am here.

I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. ‘This above all ...’

. . . hummings and clickings could be heard-the sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.

Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

It is harder to be unhappy when you are eating.

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.

I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.

People stopped calling themselves Freethinkers because it was so specifically German and anything German was terribly unpopular because of the two world wars. My family became Unitarians instead - it's the same sort of thing.

Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.

I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

We used to have superb public schools. I guess we don't anymore, but, boy, the public schools were really something and I am a product of those in Indianapolis.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.

I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.

It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.

Science is magic that works.

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

The only proof he needed for the existance of God was music.

There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.