Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
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I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.
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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 froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.
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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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Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
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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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I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves 'Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.'
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Science is magic that works.
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He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
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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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Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.
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Busy, busy, busy.
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It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
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I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
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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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The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
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The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, 'There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.'
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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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During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war - production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.
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And so on.
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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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I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.
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Roses are redAnd ready for pluckingYou're sixteenAnd ready for high school.