Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

The system promotes to the top those who don't care about the planet.

Kurt Vonnegut
Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.

Kurt Vonnegut
You couldn't help that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

Kurt Vonnegut
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Kurt Vonnegut
Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization.

Kurt Vonnegut
Maturity…is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

Kurt Vonnegut
If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.

Kurt Vonnegut
Now, you can say your Daddy is right and the other little child's Daddy is wrong, but the universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

Kurt Vonnegut
If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

Kurt Vonnegut
He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.

Kurt Vonnegut
Profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Kurt Vonnegut
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.

Kurt Vonnegut
Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

Kurt Vonnegut
I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.

Kurt Vonnegut
I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.

Kurt Vonnegut
I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he'd been drunk the night before, he would always answer offhandedly, 'Oh, I imagine.' I've always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream.

Kurt Vonnegut
Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward — and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

Kurt Vonnegut
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

Kurt Vonnegut
"I wish I had been born a bird instead," he said.
"I wish we had all been born birds instead."

Kurt Vonnegut
As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

Kurt Vonnegut
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

Kurt Vonnegut
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.

Kurt Vonnegut
"We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true," I said. "That's how to act at a party."

Kurt Vonnegut
What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

Kurt Vonnegut
Hey — guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?

Kurt Vonnegut
It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.

Kurt Vonnegut
What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

Kurt Vonnegut
What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books.

Kurt Vonnegut
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Kurt Vonnegut
I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

Kurt Vonnegut