Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

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

Kurt Vonnegut
The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage — and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still — I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

Kurt Vonnegut
Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn — so he or she can see how it ends. Even Pitecanthropus erectus and Australopithecus and Sinanthropus pekensis and the Neanderthalers are back on Earth — to see how it ends. They're all on Times Square — making change for peepshows. Or recruiting Marines.

Kurt Vonnegut
Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

Kurt Vonnegut
Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man. They don't make memories like that anymore

Kurt Vonnegut
Anyway — because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next — and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis — at any time of night or day.

Kurt Vonnegut
The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.

Kurt Vonnegut
This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Kurt Vonnegut
Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

Kurt Vonnegut
The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.

Kurt Vonnegut
We took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

Kurt Vonnegut
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

Kurt Vonnegut
If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

Kurt Vonnegut
During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war — production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.

Kurt Vonnegut
Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner's study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker's gray pinstripes, all separated here.
Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't — no matter when, no matter what.

Kurt Vonnegut
I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

Kurt Vonnegut
In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them — the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.

Kurt Vonnegut
Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Kurt Vonnegut
I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

Kurt Vonnegut
What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?

Kurt Vonnegut
Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.

Kurt Vonnegut
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

Kurt Vonnegut
Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

Kurt Vonnegut
We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

Kurt Vonnegut
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. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut