Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Quotes

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how tobecome a professional writer. I say to you, If you really want to hurt yourparents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you cando is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestitehermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you'vebeen to college.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re 10. ... Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.