Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: "That's the way the post-war movie goes.

Kurt Vonnegut
A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

Kurt Vonnegut
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Kurt Vonnegut
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut
The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Kurt Vonnegut
My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country — because they're supposedly obscene. I've seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse-Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five?

Kurt Vonnegut
I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

Kurt Vonnegut
In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

Kurt Vonnegut
If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Kurt Vonnegut
You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.

Kurt Vonnegut
Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Kurt Vonnegut
The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

Kurt Vonnegut
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.

Kurt Vonnegut
I wish one and all long and happy lives, no matter what may become of them afterwards. Use sunscreen! Don't smoke cigarettes. Cigars, however, are good for you … Firearms are also good for you … Gunpowder has zero fat and zero cholesterol. That goes for dumdums, too.

Kurt Vonnegut
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.

Kurt Vonnegut
What is it, what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf?

Kurt Vonnegut
I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.

Kurt Vonnegut
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

Kurt Vonnegut
There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.

Kurt Vonnegut
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

Kurt Vonnegut
Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.

Kurt Vonnegut
His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand — passive resistance and open displays of contempt.

Kurt Vonnegut
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Kurt Vonnegut
Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
That's the attractive thing about war, said Rosewater. Absolutely everybody gets a little something.

Kurt Vonnegut
There's love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Kurt Vonnegut
"Strange business," said Lasher. "This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon."

Kurt Vonnegut
He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

Kurt Vonnegut
Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Kurt Vonnegut