Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

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

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

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

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

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

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

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.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.

There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

Everything is nothing, with a twist.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

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

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.

Science is magic that works.

Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.

Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.

Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

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."

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow.

...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

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.

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

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