Kurt Vonnegut Quotes: 81

• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

  Mother Night

• Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

• Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

• I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

  Player Piano

• Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

  Slaughterhouse-Five

• If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC

• We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

  If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

• And so it goes...

  Slaughterhouse-Five

• Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

  A Man Without a Country

• 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.

• Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.

• A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

  The Sirens of Titan

• And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

  Slaughterhouse-Five

• Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

• How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

  Slaughterhouse-Five

• And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

  A Man Without a Country

• The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

• Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.

• Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.

  Cat's Cradle

• To be is to do - SocratesTo do is to be - SartreDo Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

• 1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

• The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

• 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.

• The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

• Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

• Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

• When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

• 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.

  Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

• Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

• Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency'.

  Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

• 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.

  Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

• Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

  Cat's Cradle

• If somebody says 'I love you' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? 'I love you, too'.

  Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

• And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.

  Mother Night

• As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

  Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

• I wanted all thingsTo seem to make some sense,So we could all be happy, yes,Instead of tense.And I made up liesSo that they all fit nice,And I made this sad worldA par-a-dise.

  A Man Without a Country

• All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

• I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

  Timequake

• 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.

  Cat's Cradle

• Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

• No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ." "And?" "No damn cat, and no damn cradle.

  Cat's Cradle

• The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.

  Cat's Cradle

• If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

• The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.

  The Sirens of Titan

• The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

  The Sirens of Titan

• Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

  Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

• There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

• You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.

  Cat's Cradle

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."(George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

• All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

  Timequake

• New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

  Breakfast of Champions

• I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

• I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

  Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

• People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.

  Breakfast of Champions

• Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.

  Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

• Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment,"the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade"— are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?

• Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

  Bagombo Snuff Box

• There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

• She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

  Cat's Cradle

• Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

  The Sirens of Titan

• Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

• Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

• Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.

  Breakfast of Champions

• You are better than you think. A-one, a-two a-three.

• My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

  Armageddon in Retrospect

• A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

• Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.

  Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

• There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

  Mother Night

• Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

• I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how tobecome a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt yourparents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you cando is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestitehermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you'vebeen to college.

• There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

  Slaughterhouse-Five

• Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.

• Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

  Cat's Cradle

• When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?

• By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.

  Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

• Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

• Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

  Hocus Pocus

• So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

  Hocus Pocus

• 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

  Hocus Pocus

• I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

• Trzymajcie się z dala od człowieka, który pracował w pocie czoła nad rozwiązaniem jakiejś zagadki, rozwiązał ją i stwierdził, że nie jest mądrzejszy niż przedtem - powiada Bokonon. - Przepełnia go bowiem mordercza pogarda do ludzi, którzy są równie głupi jak on, ale nie doszli do swojej głupoty równie ciężką pracą.

  Cat's Cradle