Kurt Vonnegut

“And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?""I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!”

“As I say, all all he wanted from the manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string. [...] He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up.”

“If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.”

“But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”

“What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”

“Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.”

“You are pooped and demoralised,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”

“She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.”

“Nothing in this book is true.”

“She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne.”

“Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.”

“He couldn't tell the difference between one politician and another. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him.”

“Kurt Vonnegut to Shakespeare:I asked him if he had love affairs with men as well as women, knowing how eager my WNYC audience was to have this matter settled. His answer, however, celebrated affection between animals of any sort:"We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk in the sun, and bleat the one at the other: what we chang'd was innocence for innocence." By changed he meant exchanged: "What we exchanged was innocence for innocence." That has to be the softest core pornography I ever heard.”

“Oh," said Castle. "Him." He shrugged. "People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.”

“You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.”

“I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.”

“He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next”

“We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

“Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency.”

“He supposed that they were part of an amazing new phase of World War Two. It was all right with him. Everything was pretty much all right with Billy.”

“Only my complacent Mona crossed the crack with a simple step . . .She wasn’t depressed or angry. In fact, she seemed to verge on laughter. ‘He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”

“The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die.”

“And how did wethen face the odds, of man's rude slapstick, yes, and God's?Quite at home and unafraid, Thank-you, in a gameour dreams remade.”

“Goodbye blue Monday.”

“I thought this was trash.Of course it’s trash! says Bokonon.”

“Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children's games as well-running, jumping, catching, throwing.Or dancing.Or singing songs.”

“It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.”

“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”

“Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.”

“I see England,I see France;I see a little girl’sUnderpants!”

“I saw that sign,' said Dwayne, "and I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on the earth for - to find out how much a man could take without breaking.”

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

“And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.”

“If people think nature is their friend then they sure don't need an enemy.”

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.”

“I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.”

“And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”

“Nice, nice, very nice.”

“How embarrassing to be human.”

“Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.”

“Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything. ”

“I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.”

“There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

“Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics”

“I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.”

“Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years.“But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”That's why people invent fights. That's why we're drawn to sports. That's why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale.”

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

“What is my definition of jazz? 'Safe sex of the highest order.”

“man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”

“Make your characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”