Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]

I'd rather have written "Cheers" than anything I've written.

Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.

I've got at least one tiny corner of the universe I can make just the way I want it.

Words may deeply wound us, but we must run that risk to be free.

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble.

I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.

How embarrassing it is to be human.

My God, the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was.

Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.

Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.

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

... uncritical love is the only real treasure.

The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.

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.

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.

All these years, I've been opening the window and making love to the world.

This is a nation tragedy, of course - that we've changed from a society to an audience.

The only proof he needed for the existance of God was music.

I can see where influential people would like Maharishi better than Jesus. My God, if the Beatles and Mia Farrow went to Jesus, He'd tell them to give all their money away.

I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.

There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

I guess everybody who isn't dead yet is a survivor.

It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.

Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.

I went to New York to be born again. And when the train plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

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

Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.

Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.

I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd.

Hardly anyone in the world is an American

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.