Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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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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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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I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
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Sally In The Garden:Sally in the garden,Siftin' cinders,Lifted up her leg,And farted like a man,The bursting of her bloomers broke sixteen winders,The cheeks of her ass went (blam, blam, blam)
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'Things don't stay the way they are,' said Finnerty. 'It's too entertaining to try to change them.'
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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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He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold.
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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.
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His poor soul was flooded with pleasure as he realized that one friend was all that a man needed in order to be well-supplied with friendship.
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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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Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor's sufferings and derring-do.
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To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
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Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
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I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
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Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.
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True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
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This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow?
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Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: 'See you later, Alligator.'
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The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves-that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well.
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There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars.All was forgiven.All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
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I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.
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Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
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While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.
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Hey - guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?