Kurt Vonnegut Quotes And Sayings

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an American writerVonnegut published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively, but was not commercially successful. After his death, he was hailed as a morbidly comical commentator on the society in which he lived, and as one of the most important contemporary writers.

We Could Have Saved The Earth But We Were Too Damned Cheap.

When A Man Becomes A Writer, I Think He Takes On A Sacred Obligation To Produce Beauty And Enlightenment And Comfort At Top Speed.

Any Man Can Call Time Out, But No Man Can Say How Long The Time Out Will Be.

True Terror Is To Wake Up One Morning And Discover That Your High School Class Is Running The Country.

Beware Of The Man Who Works Hard To Learn Something, Learns It, And Finds Himself No Wiser Than Before.

The Universe Is A Big Place, Perhaps The Biggest.

We Are What We Pretend To Be, So We Must Be Careful What We Pretend To Be.

Maturity Is A Bitter Disappointment For Which No Remedy Exists, Unless Laughter Could Be Said To Remedy Anything.

People Don't Come To Church For Preachments, Of Course, But To Daydream About God.

Human Beings Will Be Happier - Not When They Cure Cancer Or Get To Mars Or Eliminate Racial Prejudice Or Flush Lake Erie But When They Find Ways To Inhabit Primitive Communities Again. That's My Utopia.

Laughter And Tears Are Both Responses To Frustration And Exhaustion. I Myself Prefer To Laugh, Since There Is Less Cleaning Up To Do Afterward.

I Tell You, We Are Here On Earth To Fart Around, And Don't Let Anybody Tell You Different.

Call Me Jonah. My Parents Did, Or Nearly Did. They Called Me John.

To Whom It May Concern: It Is Springtime. It Is Late Afternoon.

Still And All, Why Bother? Here's My Answer. Many People Need Desperately To Receive This Message: I Feel And Think Much As You Do, Care About Many Of The Things You Care About, Although Most People Do Not Care About Them. You Are Not Alone.

People Have To Talk About Something Just To Keep Their Voice Boxes In Working Order So They'll Have Good Voice Boxes In Case There's Ever Anything Really Meaningful To Say.

I Get Up At 7:30 And Work Four Hours A Day. Nine To Twelve In The Morning, Five To Six In The Evening. Businessmen Would Achieve Better Results If They Studied Human Metabolism. No One Works Well Eight Hours A Day. No One Ought To Work More Than Four Hours.

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.

I Consider Anybody A Twerp Who Hasn't Read 'Democracy In America' By Alexis De Tocqueville. There Can Never Be A Better Book Than That One On The Strengths And Vulnerabilities Inherent In Our Form Of Government.

The Arts Are Not A Way To Make A Living. They Are A Very Human Way Of Making Life More Bearable. Practicing An Art, No Matter How Well Or Badly, Is A Way To Make Your Soul Grow, For Heaven's Sake.

I Asked Myself About The Present: How Wide It Was, How Deep It Was, How Much Was Mine To Keep.

There Is No Reason Why Good Cannot Triumph As Often As Evil. The Triumph Of Anything Is A Matter Of Organization. If There Are Such Things As Angels, I Hope That They Are Organized Along The Lines Of The Mafia.

Actually, To Be An Effective Person Politically In This Country, I Think You Have To Be Thirty Or Over, And Also You Have To Be Rich, Well-placed, You Have To Be Close To Power. And I Don't Think That Young People, Because They Look Young, Can Do Much, As I Think They Are Counterproductive.

This Country Is Being Managed To Death, Being Public Related To Death.

I'm Screamingly Funny, You Know, I Really Am In The Books. And That Helps Because I'm Funnier Than A Lot Of People, I Think, And That's Appreciated By Young People.

I Think I Belong To America's Last Generation Of Novelists. Novelists Will Come One By One From Now On, Not In Seeming Families, And Will Perhaps Write Only One Or Two Novels, And Let It Go At That.

If You Are An American, You Must Allow All Ideas To Circulate Freely In Your Community, Not Merely Your Own.

What Troubles Me Most About My Lovely Country Is That Its Children Are Seldom Taught That American Freedom Will Vanish, If, When They Grow Up, And In The Exercise Of Their Duties As Citizens, They Insist That Our Courts And Policemen And Prisons Be Guided By Divine Or Natural Law.

That Is How You Get To Be A Writer, Incidentally: You Feel Somehow Marginal, Somehow Slightly Off-balance All The Time.

I Am Honorary President Of The American Humanist Society, Having Succeeded The Late, Great Science Fiction Writer Isaac Asimov In That Utterly Functionless Capacity. We Humanists Behave As Well As We Can, Without Any Rewards Or Punishments In An Afterlife.

Here We Are, Trapped In The Amber Of The Moment. There Is No Why.

I Want To Stand As Close To The Edge As I Can Without Going Over. Out On The Edge You See All The Kinds Of Things You Can't See From The Center.

I Was Taught That The Human Brain Was The Crowning Glory Of Evolution So Far, But I Think It's A Very Poor Scheme For Survival.

If You Can Do A Half-assed Job Of Anything, You're A One-eyed Man In A Kingdom Of The Blind.

Who Is More To Be Pitied, A Writer Bound And Gagged By Policemen Or One Living In Perfect Freedom Who Has Nothing More To Say?

Anything Can Make Me Stop And Look And Wonder, And Sometimes Learn.

Evolution Can Go To Hell As Far As I Am Concerned. What A Mistake We Are. We Have Mortally Wounded This Sweet Life-supporting Planet - The Only One In The Whole Milky Way - With A Century Of Transportation Whoopee.

All Writers Are Going To Have To Learn More About Science, Because It's Such An Interesting Part Of Their Environment.

It Was Very Lucky For Me As A Writer That I Studied The Physical Sciences Rather Than English. I Wrote For My Own Amusement. There Was No Kindly English Professor To Tell Me For My Own Good How Awful My Writing Really Was. And There Was No Professor With The Power To Order Me What To Read, Either.

When I'm Being Funny, I Try Not To Offend. I Don't Think Much Of What I've Done Has Been In Really Ghastly Taste. I Don't Think I Have Embarrassed Many People Or Distressed Them.

There Is Love Enough In This World For Everybody, If People Will Just Look.

People Aren't Supposed To Look Back. I'm Certainly Not Going To Do It Anymore.

Over The Years, People I've Met Have Often Asked Me What I'm Working On, And I've Usually Replied That The Main Thing Was A Book About Dresden.

About Astrology And Palmistry: They Are Good Because They Make People Vivid And Full Of Possibilities. They Are Communism At Its Best. Everybody Has A Birthday And Almost Everybody Has A Palm.

Lot's Wife, Of Course, Was Told Not To Look Back Where All Those People And Their Homes Had Been. But She Did Look Back, And I Love Her For That, Because It Was So Human.

All Time Is All Time. It Does Not Change. It Does Not Lend Itself To Warnings Or Explanations. It Simply Is.

I'm Convinced That No One Can Amount To A Damn In The Arts If He Becomes Sweetly Reasonable, Seeing All Sides Of A Picture, Forgiving All Sins.

I Think Big Business Is A Terrible Thing For The Spirit Of The Country, As Our Spirit Is The Best Thing About Us.

I Was Not An Anthropology Student Prior To The War. I Took It Up As Part Of A Personal Readjustment Following Some Bewildering Experiences As An Infantryman And Later As A Prisoner Of War In Dresden, Germany. The Science Of The Study Of Man Has Been Extremely Satisfactory From That Personal Standpoint.

It Is A Big Temptation To Me, When I Create A Character For A Novel, To Say That He Is What He Is Because Of Faulty Wiring, Or Because Of Microscopic Amounts Of Chemicals Which He Ate Or Failed To Eat On That Particular Day.