Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

Kurt Vonnegut
I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.

Kurt Vonnegut
The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

Kurt Vonnegut
No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

Kurt Vonnegut
I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Kurt Vonnegut
I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

Kurt Vonnegut
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut
Humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

Kurt Vonnegut
All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

Kurt Vonnegut
I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

Kurt Vonnegut
How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

Kurt Vonnegut
There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life...

Kurt Vonnegut
Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

Kurt Vonnegut
Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.

Kurt Vonnegut
Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.

Kurt Vonnegut
If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Kurt Vonnegut
The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us... He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically _constantly... Contentedly adrift in the cosmos, were you?... That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while...

Kurt Vonnegut
What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

Kurt Vonnegut
Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.

Kurt Vonnegut
What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.

Kurt Vonnegut
I would have been dead if it weren't for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.

Kurt Vonnegut
We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

Kurt Vonnegut
The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

Kurt Vonnegut
Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.

Kurt Vonnegut
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

Kurt Vonnegut
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

Kurt Vonnegut
Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

Kurt Vonnegut
They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.

Kurt Vonnegut
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

Kurt Vonnegut
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.

Kurt Vonnegut