Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.
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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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Roses are redAnd ready for pluckingYou're sixteenAnd ready for high school.
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I have this theory about why men kill each other and break things. … Never mind. It's a dumb theory. I was going to say it was all sexual … but everything is sexual … but alcohol.
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How embarrassing to be human.
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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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I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.
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I wish one and all long and happy lives, no matter what may become of them afterwards. Use sunscreen! Don’t smoke cigarettes. Cigars, however, are good for you … Firearms are also good for you … Gunpowder has zero fat and zero cholesterol. That goes for dumdums, too.
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Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
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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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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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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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And so on.
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It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
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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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What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
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I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
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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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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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So it goes.
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I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
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'Poo-Tee-Weet?'
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I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.
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'I can't help it,' I said. 'My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.''You and your what?' he said.'My soul and my meat,' I said.'They're separate?' he said.'I sure hope they are,' I said. I laughed. 'I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.'