Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (born 11 November 1922, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States – died 11 April 2007, New York, United States) was an American writer known for his science-fiction elements and satirical literary style. His most famous works: Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973).
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.And 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.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.I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.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.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.Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.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.
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
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
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
Being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.If you can do no good, at least do no harm.That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.Give me knowledge or give me death!How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.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.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.Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.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.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.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.We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.Science is magic that works.Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.We’re terrible animals. I think that the Earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, 'It might have been'.If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.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.To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency'.
Kurt Vonnegut
I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.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.I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.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?All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
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
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.A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Kurt Vonnegut
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.If somebody says 'I love you' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? 'I love you, too'.I wanted all things To seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, Instead of tense. And I made up lies So that they all fit nice, And I made this sad world A paradise.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.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.We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it's only a glass of water.
