Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.

But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.

If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!

We are what we pretend to be.

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

... humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.

No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.

How’s the patient?” asked Derby. “Dead to the world.” “But not actually dead.” “No.” “How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.

The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see

The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks.

Nothing in this book is true.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers - joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them.

People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.

You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

I wish we had all been born birds instead.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.

I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time.

In the water I am beautiful.

Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?

Children get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks.

Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: "That's the way the post-war movie goes.

Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours.

If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.

You should be careful about who you pretend to be, because who you pretend to be - is actually who you are!

With words alone, Gail Godwin has created an important piece of music about a love which death can only increase and deepen. Yes, and Frances Halsband's illustrations are a haunting countermelody.

[I write] intuitively, reflexively, as if skiing down a steep mountain slope with no time to think.

Live while you live, when you're dead you're dead.

I don't reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating.

What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

I love you, because the love you gave me was the only love I've ever had, the only love I ever will have

That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.

I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

I'm a painter in my dreams, you know.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

[People] want to feel superior, so they imagine we're Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that.

I'm so sorry - we had this cottage up in Lake Maxinkuckee, in Culver. I've thought so often of the poor Pottawattomies we took this land away from. They must have loved it so.

One of [ways being lucky] was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job.

You know, the Emancipation Proclamation was like giving freedom to domestic animals.