Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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1. Find a subject you care about.2. Do not ramble, though.3. Keep it simple.4. Have the guts to cut.5. Sound like yourself.6. Say what you mean to say.7. Pity the readers.
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The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
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It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.
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I figured things would be better in Washington, that I'd find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul-Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul-the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands.
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We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
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During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war - production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.
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We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.
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I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
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Roses are redAnd ready for pluckingYou're sixteenAnd ready for high school.
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The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
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He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
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The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology-a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.
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Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
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'I tell you, Mr. Constant,' he said genially, 'it’s a thankless job, telling people it’s a hard, hard Universe they’re in.'
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So it goes.
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And so on.
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I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
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During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
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Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.
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We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.
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I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
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No grown woman is a fan of premature ejaculation.
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When the excrement hit the air conditioner (Recurring phrase throughout many chapters)
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I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.