Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon!
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Son-they say there isn’t any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.
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'That was the strength of the Nazis,' she said. 'They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make him stay away.'
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This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
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'Thank God!' said Unk.Redwine raised his eyebrows quizzically. 'Why?' he said.'Pardon me?' said Unk.'Why thank God?' said Redwine. 'He doesn’t care what happens to you. He didn’t go to any trouble to get you here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to kill you.'
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The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
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See the nigger fly the airplane!
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Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.
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I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
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I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.
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Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.
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To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
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Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.
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In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.
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You know what gets me? … How everybody says 'fuck' and 'shit' all the time. I used to be scared shitless if I'd say 'fuck' or 'shit' in public, by accident. Now everybody says 'fuck' and 'shit', 'fuck' and 'shit' all the time. Something very big must have happened while we were out of the country.
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What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.
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Never index your own book.
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Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
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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.
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That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.
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Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.
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I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'
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I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.
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My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.