Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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

The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.

The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache.

The mind reels.

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.

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

This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment

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

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

Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was--if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.

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

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

I hear he liked flowers pretty well.""Yes, " said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him."--"Out, Brief Candle

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.

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.

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.

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

Is this some kind of joke?""That's for me to know and you to find out.""Maybe you think it's funny to put up signs about people who want to commit sui

Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? Only verse: Nothing.

We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, 'People who need people are the luckiest people in the world' - she's talking about cannibals. Lot's to eat.

Time passed quickly. Constant did not move.

A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be, Billy said he didn't know.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, " the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on.

I thought the worst of everyone.

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

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

A woman's not a woman till the pills wear off.

It's embarrassing to be human.

Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.

Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say 'Shut up, I just got here myself'.

To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.

The human race is a scummy thing, and so is Earth, and so are you.

Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. 'We have a right to know what's going on!' she cried.

I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with

That's what is was to be young — to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

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 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.

We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.

She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.