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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Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
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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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I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.
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Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.
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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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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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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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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 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 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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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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Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for each reaction there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.
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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.