Kurt Vonnegut

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

Until you die… it’s all life.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers
of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12-years old, I have never
chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the
package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you
dirty rats. 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

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive
at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The
Beatles did.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
– Kurt Vonnegut

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and
wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s
only one rule that I know of, babies – God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
– Kurt Vonnegut

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some
point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of
possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost
everybody has a palm.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was
goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing
out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a
sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
– Kurt Vonnegut

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the
country.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suicide.
– Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
– Kurt Vonnegut

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you
can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are
a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or
badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the
radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible
can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
– Kurt Vonnegut

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without
expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to
sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
– Kurt Vonnegut

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged by my
countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and
natural it was to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing
their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot
each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
– Kurt Vonnegut

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

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see
all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I
myself am a work of fiction.
– Kurt Vonnegut

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing.
– Kurt Vonnegut

That’s one thing earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: ignore the awful
times, and concentrate on the good ones.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s
a very poor scheme for survival.
– Kurt Vonnegut

I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk the night
before, he would always answer offhandedly, “Oh, I imagine.” I’ve always liked that answer. It
acknowledges life as a dream.
– Kurt Vonnegut

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What
we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a
person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
– Kurt Vonnegut

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

I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can’t help
thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where
evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.
– Kurt Vonnegut

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for
smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Everything is nothing, with a twist.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?
– 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

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most
daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be
cured.
– Kurt Vonnegut

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
– Kurt Vonnegut

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

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is
that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for
over and over again.
– Kurt Vonnegut

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without
reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
– Kurt Vonnegut

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be
loved.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Maturity… is knowing what your limitations are… Maturity is a bitter disappointment for
which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Science is magic that works.
– Kurt Vonnegut

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

I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder.
We call ourselves “Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.”
– Kurt Vonnegut