Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

Kurt Vonnegut
This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.

Kurt Vonnegut
The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

Kurt Vonnegut
.. hummings and clickings could be heard-the sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.

Kurt Vonnegut
If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!

Kurt Vonnegut
It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace.

Kurt Vonnegut
Those who live by electronics die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.

Kurt Vonnegut
The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.

Kurt Vonnegut
Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

Kurt Vonnegut
Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?

Kurt Vonnegut
For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.

Kurt Vonnegut
Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace.

Kurt Vonnegut
The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.

Kurt Vonnegut
Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.

Kurt Vonnegut
Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.

Kurt Vonnegut
The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks.

Kurt Vonnegut
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

Kurt Vonnegut
It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now.

Kurt Vonnegut
Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?
Answer: That is bird poop, too.

Kurt Vonnegut
There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.

Kurt Vonnegut
I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. 'This above all...'

Kurt Vonnegut
The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.

Kurt Vonnegut
We are America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

Kurt Vonnegut
What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

Kurt Vonnegut
Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of...less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
'Think of that.

Kurt Vonnegut
Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

Kurt Vonnegut
I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Kurt Vonnegut
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

Kurt Vonnegut