Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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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.'
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Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
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Here lies Howard Campbell’s essence,Freed from his body’s noisome nuisance.His body, empty, prowls the earth,Earning what a body’s worth.If his body and his essence remain apart,Burn his body, but spare this, his heart.
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I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
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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.
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Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
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As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.
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Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
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She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.
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Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.
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Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
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Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
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In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them - the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.
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I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
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Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.
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I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
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Listen:The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. 'Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?' she asked me.'The big show is inside my head,' I said
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Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
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I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.
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I don't care if I'm remembered or not when I'm dead. (A scientist I knew at General Electric, who was married to a woman named Josephine, said to me, 'Why should I buy life insurance? If I die, I won't care what's happening to Jo. I won't care about anything. I'll be dead.')
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You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet.
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It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
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I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
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One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.