Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

As a younger man, Trout would have sneered at the sign about brotherhood - posted on the rim of a bomb crater, as anyone could see. But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.

Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything.

They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun ...
They were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet.

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.

You have never seen greatness in a Presidency; I have. It was a rich kid who you would think had every reason to be a horse's ass - Franklin Roosevelt. He was humane and wise and resourceful. He was called a traitor to his class.

He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.

They say the first thing to go when you're old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn't true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.

The main thing now was to find the steering wheel. At first, Billy windmilled his arms, hoping to find it by luck. When that didn't work, he became methodical, working in such a way that the wheel could not possibly escape him. He placed himself hard against the left-hand door, searched every square inch of the area before him. When he failed to find the wheel, he moved over six inches, and searched again. Amazingly, he was eventually hard against the right-hand door, without having found the wheel. He concluded that somebody had stolen it. This angered him as he passed out. He was in the back seat of his car, which was why he couldn't find the steering wheel.

There was a tap on his shoulder. The man who had fed him now told him to leave.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

All that anybody has in the way of a reputation anymore is an odor which, from birth to death, cannot be modified. People are who they are, and that is that. The Law of Natural Selection has made human beings absolutely honest in that regard. Everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be.

Dwayne's real mother was a spinster school teacher who wrote sentimental poetry and claimed to be descended from Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a king. His real father was an itinerant typesetter, who seduced his mother by setting her poems in type. He didn't sneak them into a newspaper or anything. It was enough for her that they were set in type.

Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor's Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: "Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?"
"No," I said.
"Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?"
"No," I said.
"You may be entitled to the Survivor's Syndrome, but you didn't get it," she said. "Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?

I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously.

You will last a lot longer, if you don't try to sing.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.

He also began to suspect, since he was so much busier than anybody else, that he was the leader

They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first.
The first is, "Here I am, here I am, here I am."
The second is, "So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are

I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.

Winston Niles Rumfoord was something else again - morally, spatially, socially, sexually, and electrically.

(a man in love speaking)
"I don't notice much of anything anymore but Marie." He laid his hand on his chest. "This force," he said, "it just does with you what it wants to do with you, makes you feel what it wants to make you feel."
"Tango

I'd give my right arm to be enthusiastic.

Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside.

I have several children - seven, to be exact - too many children for an atheist, certainly. Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say, Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am - Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You're wrong.

In the year Ten Million, according to Koradubian, there would be a tremendous house-cleaning. All records relating to the period between the death of Christ and the year One Million A.D. would be hauled to the dumps and burned. This would be done, said Koradubian, because museums and archives would be crowding the living right off the Earth. The million-year period to which the burned junk related would be summed up in history books in one sentence, according to Koradubian: Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years.

But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.

Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.

Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally and if they would contribute mutually to each others' welfare.
This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

This family knew that Dresden was gone. Those with eyes had seen it burn and burn, understood that they were on the edge of a desert now. Still-they had opened for business, had polished the glass and wound the clocks and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come.

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm

Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.

Somewhere in there was Christmas. Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 again - to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.

But anyway, it's obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals.

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it
love yourself

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand - passive resistance and open displays of contempt.

Well, it just don't seem like nobody feels he's worth a crap to nobody no more, and it's a hell of a screwy thing, people gettin' buggered by things they made theirselves.

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat's Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C

The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful ... to multiply and to live as long as possible - to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever.

I don't know what's going on ... and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over.

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!" "I loved everything I saw!

He paused, and then he recited with wry mournfulness the beginning of a poem he had learned to scream in Bermuda, when he was a little boy. The poem was all the more poignant, since it mentioned two nations which no longer existed as such. "I see England," he said, "I see France -

It's incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it - and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition.

As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely World War Three.

Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

"Papa" referred to Frank five times as: " ... the blood son of Dr. Felix Hoenikker."
The phrase reeked of cannibalism.

The pictures are bound to mutilate the words. Those words weren't meant to have pictures with them!

They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.

Americans ... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Then Trout made a good point, too. 'Well,' he said, 'I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that dumped it.' Trout raised his arms in celebration. 'Up your ass with Mobil gas,' he said.

As a member of a zippier generation, with sparkle in its eyes and a snap in its stride, let me tell you what kept us as high as kites a lot of the time: hatred. All my life I've had people to hate - from Hitler to Nixon, not that those two are at all comparable in their villainy. It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

A twerp was defined as a guy who put his set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs.

Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, wasn't taking any of this in.

So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. *** The flaw in the Christ

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985)

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

I'm your Creator", I said. "You're in the middle of a book right now-close to the end of it, actually.

For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a contradiction in terms

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.

Soft citizens of the American democracy learned to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream.

She asserted that Europeans like them were robbers with guns who went all over the world stealing other people's land, which they then called their plantations. And they made the people they robbed their slaves. She was taking a long view of history, of course. Tarkington's Trustees certainly hadn't roamed the world on ships, armed to the teeth and looking for lightly defended real estate. Her point was that they were heirs to the property of such robbers, and to their mode of thinking, even if they had been born poor and had only recently dismantled an essential industry, or cleaned out a savings bank, or earned big commissions by facilitating the sale of beloved American institutions or landmarks to foreigners.

If you can't learn about reading and writing from Kurt, maybe you should be doing something else.

Who ever told you a Chinaman was a coloured man?

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

I got a letter from a sappy woman a while back - she knew I was sappy too, which is to say a lifelong Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if I thought it was a mistake to bring a little baby into a world as troubled as this one is. And I replied, what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met. They could be almost anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently and honorably in societies which were so often obscene. Perhaps many of us here, regardless of our ages or power or wealth, can be saints for her child to meet.

It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children.

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon
millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any "Good Old Days," there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, "Don't look at me. I just got here.

Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.

He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but they can drive it into the corners of any room where they are being played.

The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flame-thrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed - men, women, and children indiscriminately killed.

He's meeting his girl now, a girl not much older than 14. A five-and-ten-cents store Cleopatra, a four letter word.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

It distresses me deeply that ideas are not to be circulated freely in the USA if certain persons have their way. One of the things that was great about this country was that I could say anything and that everyone else could say anything and we would compare all possible ideas and arrive at opinions.

It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."
She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.
Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

It's a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

The books he and his supporters wanted out of the schools, one of mine among them, were not pornographic, although he would have liked our audience to think so. (There is the word "motherfucker" one time in my Slaughterhouse-Five, as in "Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker." Ever since that word was published, way back in 1969, children have been attempting to have intercourse with their mothers. When it will stop no one knows.)

This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn't keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it's torn to shreds and thrown to the mob.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

Oh, a very sorry people, yes,
Did I find here.
Oh, they had no music,
And they had no beer.
And, oh, everywhere
Where they tried to perch
Belonged to Castle Sugar, Incorporated,
Or the Catholic church.

My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips: "If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what it's like in here." And so on. ***

Jesus
if Kilgore Trout could only write! Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

And Castle nodded sagely. 'So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn't agree more.'
'Do you really agree?' I asked. 'A minute ago you said something about Jesus.'
'Who?' said Castle.
'Jesus Christ?'
'Oh,' said Castle. 'Him.' He shrugged. '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.'
'I see.' I knew I wasn't going to have an easy time writing a popular article about him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought and said.

The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.