Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.

He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.

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

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

It's a small world. When you put it in a cemetery, it is.

Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by.

The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Don't be reckless with other peoples hearts. And don't put up with people that are reckless with yours.

People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next

The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.

Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.

Be patient, Ophelia. Love, Hamlet

I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books.

Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived.

I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.

If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

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.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Luck is not the hand of God.... Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.

You are better than you think.

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.

The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.

All was forgiven. All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

Tis better to have love and lust Than to let our apparatus rust.