Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, 'fit to split the ears of groundlings.' He asked if it had a name, and I said 'Indianapolis.'

Kurt Vonnegut

• Experience
• Death
• English

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Quotes to Explore

• I get tired of comedies where there are a bunch of funny guys and a beautiful woman who doesn't do anything funny. And I don't like books where there's a rough-and-tumble boy and a really clever, snotty girl. That's just not my experience with teenagers.

  

  Patrick Ness
  • Experience
  • Beautiful
  • Girl

• With the death of bin Laden, it's finally time for Congress to bring back the pre-9-11 legal norm, before we decided it was okay to toss out our civil liberties if the 'bad guys' were scary enough.

  

  Aaron Swartz
  • Time
  • Bad
  • Death

• I hate these platforms that are all over the place today; they are all about grabbing attention. They are suburban! I never do a platform. Well, I did, in the 1970s, but that was a bad experience.

  

  Manolo Blahnik
  • Experience
  • Bad
  • Today

• I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.

  

  Candace Camp
  • Writing
  • History
  • Education

• Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often. To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person - not to get too heavy about it - but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer.

  

  Gabriel Byrne
  • Real
  • Experience
  • Prayer

• Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

  

  Samuel Butler
  • Life
  • Experience
  • Learning

• I got the travel bug when I was quite young. My parents took me and my sisters out of school and we travelled all over Europe. It was an eye-opening experience and, although I love Norway, I also enjoy visiting new countries. I don't get homesick.

  

  Magnus Carlsen
  • Experience
  • Parents
  • Travel

• In the long run, we need to build a leadership force of people. We have a whole strategy around not only providing folks with the foundational experience during their two years with us, but also then accelerating their leadership in ways that is strategic for the broader education reform movement.

  

  Wendy Kopp
  • People
  • Long
  • Experience

• I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.

  

  Garrison Keillor
  • People
  • English
  • Intelligence

• The reality, for me at least, is that the finest recreation of a paper game, played on computer, pales in comparison with the actual, face-to-face experience.

  

  Warren Spector
  • Experience
  • Game
  • Reality

• If your faith is opposed to experience, to human learning and investigation, it is not worth the breath used in giving it expression.

  

  E. W. Howe
  • Experience
  • Giving
  • Faith

• Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.

  

  M. Scott Peck
  • Real
  • Love
  • Experience

• I'm not afraid of death, but I resent it. I think it's unfair and irritating.

  

  Viggo Mortensen
  • Think
  • Death
  • Afraid

• In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

  

  J. Paul Getty
  • Experience
  • Change
  • Enemy

• It'll be interesting to raise kids in New York City. I'm from suburbia, so I don't really have any experience with what it's going to be like here.

  

  Aaron Lazar
  • Experience
  • Kids
  • Interesting

• Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

  

  Isaac Asimov
  • Life
  • Death
  • Peaceful

• The air of the English is down-to-earth. They care about details; there's a tradition, but there's also a counter-culture: the younger generation versus the older generation and so on. But then that's well blended into a happy balance and crystallised into common sense.

  

  Tadashi Yanai
  • Happy
  • Earth
  • Culture

• I don't believe in the so-called Latino explosion when it comes to movies. Jennifer Lopez doesn't have an accent. She grew up in New York speaking English, not Spanish. Her success is very important because she represents a different culture, but it doesn't help me.

  

  Salma Hayek
  • Up
  • Believe
  • Different

• Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences - the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe that they're going to be reunited with everyone they love, and death is an illusion.

  

  Sam Harris
  • Believe
  • Love
  • Death

• We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time.

  

  D. H. Lawrence
  • Time
  • Experience
  • Book

• When we are out there selling a new picture, when did it become part of the deal that you have to sell the family? To use the juicy part of your life to get attention? I'm not blaming the reporters. It's the system.

  

  Jimmy Smits
  • Life
  • Family
  • Attention

• When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.'

  

  D. A. Pennebaker
  • Life
  • Time
  • Kind

• During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, 'fit to split the ears of groundlings.' He asked if it had a name, and I said 'Indianapolis.'

  

  Kurt Vonnegut
  • Experience
  • Death
  • English