Kurt Vonnegut quotes and sayings

Author | Born: November 11, 1922 - Died: April 11, 2007

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

How's the patient? asked Derby. Dead to the world. But not actually dead. No. How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

See the cat? See the cradle?

Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

What memories for mud to have.

Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.

No matter how wonderful a sentence is, if it doesn't add new and useful information, it should be removed.

People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

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

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : A man without a home can't be lost.

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

What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Never schedule a board meeting on Wednesday because it kills two weekends.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.

Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, Why just go ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.

It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true, I said. That's how to act at a party.

I concluded that the best thing for me and for those around me was to want nothing, to be enthusiastic about nothing, to be as unmotivated as possible, in fact, so that I would never again hurt anyone.

Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.

Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

It is harder to be unhappy when you are eating.

The name of the new religion, said Rumfoord, is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. . . The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

You know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.

What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.

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.

The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us... He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically _constantly... Contentedly adrift in the cosmos, were you?... That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while.

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

So 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.

It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.

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.

Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard, President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the worlds ills can be traced to the fact that Mans knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : I can see where influential people would like Maharishi better than Jesus. My God, if the Beatles and Mia Farrow went to Jesus, He'd tell them to give all their money away.

Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

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.

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra.

I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball.

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

I want a military funeral when I diethe bugler, the flag on the casket, the ceremonial firing squad, the hallowed ground.... It will be a way of achieving what I've always wanted more than anythingsomething I could have had, if only I'd managed to get myself killed in the war.... The unqualified approval of my community.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

No art is possible without a dance with death.

Beware of "grandfalloons" and "foma". A "grandfalloon" is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. "Foma" are harmless truths intended to comfort simple souls.

On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar.

After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.

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.

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

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

Also, I think that, you know, it's tribal behavior. I don't think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved. He is simply representing a tribe.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That's all I can say.

Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enimity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity.

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow.

There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End.

. . 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.

Isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you give to yourself.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.

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

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

egregious. most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. it has a much more interesting story than that to tell. it means "outside the herd." imagine that - thousands of people, outside the herd.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

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.

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

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

Tis better to have love and lust Than to let our apparatus rust.

The right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances is now worth a pitcher of warm spit. That's because TV will not come and treat it respectfully. Television is really something.

You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.

Well, we are terribly divided politically, yes, and, you know, I don't mean to intimidate you and your listeners but I have a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational quote : "Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer." Castle was respectful.

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

The person who writes the bank's commercials is not the person who makes the loans.

Each one of us has to be what he or she is.

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Kurt Vonnegut quotes and sayings

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