Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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.

Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

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.

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

After that demonstration everybody was thinking, what's going to happen to these wonderful men who have been so useful to us? We have to give people something to do with life.

Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is a part of that.

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

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

I think jokes are a perfectly viable form of literature. Some critics take issue with me because I make my points and discuss my ideas with jokes, rather than with oceanic tragedy.

Also, I think that, you know, it's tribal behavior. I don't think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved. He is simply representing a tribe.

Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

Don't put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action.

That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.

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.

Truth can be really powerful stuff if you're not expecting it.

I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I'm like Karl Marx, I'm up for anything that makes people happy.

. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.

Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.

They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.

Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.

My god-life! who can understand eve one little minute of it? 'don't try' he said 'just pretend you understand.

The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.

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.

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.

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.

One [television] program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.

The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!

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.

Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.

All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, "Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big

Until you die .. it's all life.

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

Unhappy failures need not apply.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so.

The name of the new religion," said Rumfoord, "is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

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

That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.

My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.

I would not be interested in writing if I didn't feel that what I wrote was an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".