Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Kurt Vonnegut

• Time
• Balance

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• People look at stuff like 'Godzilla' and 'Avengers' and think I only do blockbusters, or however you wanna put it, but in reality, I can make double or triple what I got paid for 'Avengers' by doing other stuff - there are other options, but I don't want to work with this person or that person, and so I don't do it.

  

  Aaron Taylor-Johnson
  • People
  • Work
  • Reality

• Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

  

  Walt Disney
  • Time
  • Mind
  • Business

• There was a time when I was practicing law in New York and I wanted to find something else to do. So I ended up leaving the practice of law to pursue my art and it just happened to be out of Lego bricks.

  

  Nathan Sawaya
  • Up
  • Time
  • Art

• I was 25 years old when I arrived in D.C. It was just myself and two people who worked and helped me in the kitchen. I was only cooking for three people most of the time.

  

  Daniel Boulud
  • People
  • Time
  • Myself

• Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

  

  Padgett Powell
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Book

• I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

  

  Hans-Ulrich Obrist
  • Time
  • Music
  • Science

• If you're having a down time at school and people are bullying you, they don't know you. They don't have the right to have an opinion on you.

  

  Maisie Williams
  • People
  • Time
  • School

• Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.

  

  Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Time
  • Men
  • Parents

• I don't consider Los Angeles home anymore; ultimately, it was pretty negative, but I did spend my formative years in the Valley and all around L.A. proper. Through my teenage years and into my young adulthood, up until the age of 30, I spent a good amount of time there.

  

  Patrick deWitt
  • Up
  • Time
  • Good

• I'm not afraid of turning 80 and I have lots of things to do. I don't have time for dying.

  

  Ingvar Kamprad
  • Time
  • Dying
  • Afraid

• Teachers need time to engage with colleagues - whether shadowing, mentoring, co-teaching or conferring. They need a voice in school decisions and to be trusted as professionals.

  

  Randi Weingarten
  • Time
  • School
  • Decisions

• I had wanted to place the Eye-in-the-Sea at an oasis on the bottom of the ocean, in some site rich with life that was likely to be patrolled by large predators. The first time I got to test the camera at such a place was in 2004, in the north end of the Gulf of Mexico, at an amazing location called the brine pool.

  

  Edith Widder
  • Life
  • Time
  • Amazing

• It was a lovely opportunity for the first time in my whole career to stand up and thank people who are really responsible for me getting to realize my dreams.

  

  Rachel Griffiths
  • People
  • Up
  • Time

• I don't listen to music, actually. Obviously I go to clubs; I stand in elevators; a lot of my friends are musicians; I hear music all the time. But I don't have my own collection of music.

  

  Natalia Kills
  • Time
  • Music
  • Friends

• A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

  

  Abraham Polonsky
  • Up
  • Time
  • Long

• Another time I cracked two of the vertebrae in my back and broke a rib.

  

  Zakk Wylde Black Label Society
  • Time
  • Back
  • Broke

• When I'm writing, I spend all my time in The Grocer on Elgin buying ready-made meals; I think they are the only reason my husband and kids haven't left me.

  

  Sadie Jones
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Kids

• I think as a child you know when it's time for your parents to split. You realise they love each other, but they're not in love with each other. And I think as a child it's much better for your parents to split than for them to stay and have dysfunction within the family.

  

  Abbie Cornish
  • Time
  • Family
  • Love

• I just said, you know, this is a great track but this lyric, I don't believe it. It sounds like I'm trying to say something, instead of it naturally coming out of me, like I was saying something that I already knew. Anyway, I can't remember what it was. And either I threw it all out or I threw 90 percent of it out, and kept a line or two. That's happened a couple of times to me. Not too often, but a couple of times. Very aggravating when it does happen.

  

  Paul Simon Simon & Garfunkel
  • Time
  • Track
  • Lyric

• When you left the house today, you had the intention of putting clothes on and you did. You didn't try to put your pants on today. You simply put them on. The same has to hold for all of our intentions. We don't try to be more loving partners. We make the intention, and we act on it.

  

  Patch Adams
  • Today
  • House
  • Clothes

• I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

  

  Fred Allen
  • People
  • Long
  • Taken

• I don't think anything is forever, but when my kids tell me they love me, that's forever.

  

  Steven Tyler Aerosmith
  • Kids
  • Forever

• If you got in my truck, you were listening to country music, and that's the way it was for a long time. I'm a little more open to other sources of music now, a lot more. But for the formative years, I was just very into country.

  

  Dierks Bentley
  • Time
  • Music
  • Long

• That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

  

  Kurt Vonnegut
  • Time
  • Balance