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Maturity ... is knowing what your limitations are ... Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
KURT VONNEGUT, Cat's Cradle
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.
KURT VONNEGUT, Cat's Cradle
You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.
No art is possible without a dance with death.
KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse-Five
There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.
KURT VONNEGUT, Welcome to the Monkey House
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries
KURT VONNEGUT, A Man Without a Country
Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
Life is no way to treat an animal.
KURT VONNEGUT, A Man Without a Country
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
KURT VONNEGUT, Breakfast of Champions
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
KURT VONNEGUT, A Man Without a Country
I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
I grew up in a house crammed with books. But I never had to read a book for academic credit, never had to write a paper about it, never had to prove I’d understood it in a seminar. I am a hopelessly clumsy discusser of books.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Paris Review, spring 1977
She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.
KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse-Five
The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody ... would be to not be used for anything by anybody.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
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. The big eye was a glutton for great theater. The big eye was indifferent as to whether the Earthling shows were comedy, tragedy, farce, satire, athletics, or vaudeville. Its demand, which Earthlings apparently found as irresistible as gravity, was that the shows be great. The demand was so powerful that Earthlings did almost nothing but perform for it, night and day.... The big eye was the only audience that Earthlings really cared about.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
KURT VONNEGUT, attributed, Quit Your Day Job! (Jim Denney)
I learned to write for peers rather than for teachers. Most beginning writers don’t get to write for peers—to catch hell from peers.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Paris Review, spring 1977
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.
KURT VONNEGUT, Palm Sunday
Anybody who has traveled this far on a fool's errand ... has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by completing the errand.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion.... I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.
KURT VONNEGUT, Palm Sunday
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.
KURT VONNEGUT, Cold Turkey
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.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
KURT VONNEGUT, The New York Times Book Review, September 5, 1965
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.
KURT VONNEGUT, Timequake
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States ... and when the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
KURT VONNEGUT, Bluebeard: A Novel
Big John's son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would amount to something. But then Little John came home in a body bag.
KURT VONNEGUT, Bluebeard
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
KURT VONNEGUT, Harrison Bergeron
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
KURT VONNEGUT, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?
My father died many years ago now--of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse-Five
The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
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