Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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We don't piss in your ashtrays,So please don't throw cigarettes in our urinals.
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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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Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
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People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.
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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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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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Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
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If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke.
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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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Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
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Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.
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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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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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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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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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I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
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I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
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I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
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Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.
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Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.
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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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You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet.
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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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He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold.