Kurt Vonnegut

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.

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

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

If you would be unloved and forgotten be reasonable.

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

We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.

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?

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Never index your own book.

We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.

My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.

This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately no matter what the charmer had in mind.

No art is possible without a dance with death.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

You cant just eat good food. Youve got to talk about it too. And youve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.

Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suicide.

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

Earthlings are the great explainers explaining why this event is structured as it is telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.

I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.

Earthlings went on being friendly when they should have been thinking instead.

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

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

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

Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.

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

When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

One of the main effects of war after all is that people are discouraged from being characters.

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.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

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.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

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

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

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

Fullers cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger.

I went to New York to be born again.

Being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

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

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

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

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

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

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

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

The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

Science is magic that works.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.

The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

Evolution is so creative. Thats how we got giraffes.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow?

It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.

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.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

I tell you we are here on Earth to fart around and dont let anybody tell you different.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

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

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

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Thats one thing Earthlings might learn to do if they tried hard enough Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.

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

The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Were doomed to repeat the past no matter what. Thats what it is to be alive. Its pretty dense kids who havent figured that out by the time theyre ten.... Most kids cant afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.

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.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.