Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.

I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency."

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer." "What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes - "with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim.

Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.

If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?

So many people think that practicing an art is a good way to make a living. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

Until you die .. it's all life.

History! Read it and weep!

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

The artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole though no such holes exist.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.

And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.

All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.

Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.

Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.

I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.

My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.

Every writer has to write his speech.

People who were so good. There were angels.

I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis.

Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.

My god-life! who can understand eve one little minute of it? 'don't try' he said 'just pretend you understand.

I would not be interested in writing if I didn't feel that what I wrote was an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen.