Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Quotes

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

Thanks 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.

What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

I 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.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

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

The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

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?

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.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington D.C.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]

Homo-Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

If somebody says 'I love you' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? 'I love you, too'.

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

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.

To be is to do - SocratesTo do is to be - SartreDo Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

I wanted all thingsTo seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, Instead of tense.And I made up liesSo that they all fit nice, And I made this sad worldA par-a-dise.

My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.

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

Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.