Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

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.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

A chaplain’s assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.

People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

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

My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.

This is Sunday, and the question arises, what’ll I start tomorrow?

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

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.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

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.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

Never index your own book.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

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.

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?

I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

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.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

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.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.

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.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Science is magic that works.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

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.

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.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

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.

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.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

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.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

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.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.

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.

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.

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.

There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.