Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

And God created every living creature
that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak.
God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke.
Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He
went away. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

He won all those medals in the Second World War, which was staged by robots so that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-will reaction to such a holocaust. The war was such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robots anywhere who didn't have a part to play. Harold Newcomb Wilbur got his medals for killing Japanese, who were yellow robots. They were fueled by rice. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water. My dear thirteen-year-old daughter Lily, having become a pretty adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary steeplechase. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

It is a common experience among jailbirds to wake up and wonder why they are in jail ~ Kurt Vonnegut

To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula said to mankind in effect: "What makes you think you're going anywhere? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There's many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought.
The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections! ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older than I was, and my parents were both talkers. So at the dinner table when I was very young, I was boring to all those other people. They did not want to hear about the dumb childish news of my days. They wanted to talk about really important stuff that happened in high school or maybe in college or at work. So the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It was through this viewer that he got his first reply from Tralfamadore. The reply was written on Earth in huge stones on a plain in what is now England. The ruins of the reply still stand, and are known as Stonehenge. The meaning of Stonehenge in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above, is: Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You can't write novels without a touch of paranoia. I'm paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I shouldn't be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I am committing suicide by cigarette, I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn't. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Best thunderclap came from Spengler, to the effect that science is either true or false, art is either shallow or deep. Second best came from some Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, I think, to the effect that one man's right to swing his fists stops where another man's nose begins. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Someday son all this will be yours. Father and son atop a garbage dump. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

In a 1972 story titled "The Big Space Fuck," Kurt Vonnegut names his spaceship with "eight hundred pounds of freeze-dried jizzum in its nose" the Arthur C. Clarke, "in honor of a famous space pioneer." Its mission is to impregnate the Andromeda Galaxy. ~ Michael Benson

Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Anyway - because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next - and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis - at any time of night or day. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

He was held together by cotter pins, hose clamps, nuts, bolts, and magnets. Salo's tangerine-colored skin, which was so expressive when he was emotionally disturbed, could be put on or taken off like an Earthling wind-breaker. A magnetic zipper held it shut. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

World War One were simply additional places of hideously dangerous work, where a few men could supervise the wasting of millions of lives in the hopes of making money. It ~ Kurt Vonnegut

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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.) ~ Kurt Vonnegut

TV is an eraser. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. "Thank you very much," I said. That is exactly what she was waiting for. "You're entirely welcome," she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed. Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes. The idea was to hasten the end of the war. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The horse jumped over the fucking fence. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much
who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. He said it was the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for people, and he wanted to get rid of it. But when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word "opium" wasn't simply metaphorical. Back then real opium was the only painkiller available, for toothaches or cancer of the throat, or whatever. He himself had used it. As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that, and certainly didn't want to abolish it. OK? He might have said today as I say tonight, "Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I'm so glad it works. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Prohibition was better than no liquor at all. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Its basic axiom is to be followed by individuals as well as great nations, by Losers and Winners alike. We have demonstrated the workability of the axiom in Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Biafra, in Palestinian refugee camps, in our own ghettos, in our migrant labor camps, on our Indian reservations, in our institutions for the defective and the deformed and the aged. This is it: Ignore agony. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Little Newt snorted. "Religion!"
"Beg your pardon?" Castle said.
"See the cat?" asked Newt. "See the cradle? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Human beings used to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all
as they pleased. My mother could do the waltz, the tango, the rumba ... ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Unhappy failures need not apply. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I myself find him a master of utterly terminal pessimism, appalled by all that an insane humanity may yet survive to do. We are pollution. He wants us to feel no pity for Homo sapiens, and so excludes appealing women and children from his tales. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Billy was guided by dread and the lack of dread. Dread told him when to stop. Lack of it told him when to move again. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Dammit, you've got to be kind. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret and to get out of bodies every time there's an air raid or the enemy fires a rocket or something. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, 'You're a MAN now!'
I damn near killed my first German. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Who ever told you a Chinaman was a coloured man? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

and she said, 'So there you are!' She asked Frank what he thought he was doing, and he said, 'Experimenting.' That's what Frank always used to say when people asked him what he thought he was doing. He always said, 'Experimenting.'

(p. 15) ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The same can be said about this morning's issue of The New York Times. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Fern showed him an organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. 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. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It's fresh to you because you're too young to know anything but the way things are now.
Actually, it is kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn't it? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kilgore Trout was shadowing him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen. Most of Trout's novels, after all, dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things. Trout believed in things like that, was greedy to have their existence proved. "You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?" Trout asked Billy. "No." "The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he'll realize there's nothing under him. He thinks he's standing on thin air. He'll jump a mile. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

He was a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer on Cape Cod. We had been privates in the war, infantry scouts. We had never expected to make any money after the war, but we were doing quite well. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I'm eighty-three and homeless. It was the same when World War II ended. The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was "Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?" That what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now? I've wondered where home is. It's when I was in Indianapolis when I was nine years old. Had a dog, a cat, a brother, a sister. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

How could I ever trust a man who's been as good a spy as you have? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I like to think we were man and wife. Life itself can be sacramental. The supposition was that we would be leaving the Garden of Eden together, and would cleave to one another in the wilderness through thick and think. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL. D. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

What the Englishman said about survival was this: "If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die." He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: "They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is this much to be said for it: it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go." So it goes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Terrified, because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim. His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim. It was like an execution. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" See all I've made, the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars. And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. "Nice going, God! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I can still remember what I was like when I was sixteen. It was hell to be that excited. Then as now, orgasms gave no relief. Ten minutes after an orgasm, guess what? Nothing would do but that you have another one. And there was homework besides! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think I'm such hot stuff.

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.

That's how I feel. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The white men wouldn't do it either, of course. They called it women's work, and the women called it Nigger work. *** ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I do realize that I am a very slow realizer. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty - and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past five years, I'd worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny. ~ Ernest Cline

I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

After the First World War, Germany was trying to build a democracy. Then when the Reichstag, the legislature, was burned down in 1933, this was seen as such an emergency that human rights had to be suspended. The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there's a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don't feel that we are in any great danger. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

We rolled apart…. We spoke coherently to each other for the first time since bedding down. "Hello," she said. "Hello," I said. "Welcome home," she said. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I love you, Eliza," I said.
She thought about it. "No," she said at last, "I don't like it."
"Why not?" I said.
"It's as though you were pointing a gun at my head," she said. "It's just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don't mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, 'I love you, too'? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Q: What is wrong with the world?
A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else
where everybody learns to make his or her own way. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small dictionaries relate to time. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

There were lots of things to stop and see - and then it was time to go, always time to go. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You can't fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

What can I call a coincidence like that but the Hand of God? ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Her punishment was to be made to feel like a fool. She had been given her opportunity to participate in civilization, and she had muffled it. ~ Kurt Vonnegut