Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.
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When I was a naive young recruit in Spain, I used to wonder why soldiers bayoneted oil paintings, shot the noses off statues and defecated into grand pianos. I now understand: it was to teach civilians the deepest sort of respect for men in uniform - uncontrollable fear.
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I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.
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A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.
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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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And so on.
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If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
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Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
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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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Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
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'I would say, ‘Is there anything I can do?’-but Skip once told me that that was the most hateful and stupid expression in the English language.'
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There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.
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People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
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If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.
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War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
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The band at the far end of the hall, amplified to the din of an elephant charge, smashed and hewed at the tune as though in a holy war against silence.
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'As far as I’m concerned,' said Constant, 'the Universe is a junk yard, with everything in it overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain,' said Constant, 'has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet.'
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What we will be seeking … for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.
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Roses are redAnd ready for pluckingYou're sixteenAnd ready for high school.
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Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.
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'I wish I had been born a bird instead,' he said.'I wish we had all been born birds instead.'
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Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
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'You finally fell in love, I see,' said Salo.'Only an Earthling year ago,' said Constant. 'It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
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If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.