Vonnegut Kurt Quotes & Sayings

As Trout departed, he sent this telepathic message to the Creator of the Universe, serving as His eyes and ears and conscience: Am headed for Forty-second Street now. How much do you already know about Forty-second Street? — Kurt Vonnegut

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

The big show is inside my head, — Kurt Vonnegut

Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that? — Kurt Vonnegut

A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is just dead machinery. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war. — Kurt Vonnegut

Any writer who presents an American home today where the television is not the head of the family is living in a fantasy world. — Kurt Vonnegut

Future civilizations - better civilizations than this one - are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter. — Kurt Vonnegut

They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Son
they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose. — Kurt Vonnegut

You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind. — Kurt Vonnegut

Every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. — Kurt Vonnegut

My politics in a nutshell: let's stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need, and get back to giving human beings what we need. — Kurt Vonnegut

The whole World was for sale to anyone who had Yen or was willing to perform fellatio. — Kurt Vonnegut

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Q: What is wrong with the world?
A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves. — Kurt Vonnegut

The men wore loose loincloths that did little to conceal penes like pendulums on grandfather clocks. There — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was. — Kurt Vonnegut

So it goes."
Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn't notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion - and dismissal of emotion - it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There's a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to. — Kurt Vonnegut

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on. — Kurt Vonnegut

To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

(a man in love speaking)
"I don't notice much of anything anymore but Marie." He laid his hand on his chest. "This force," he said, "it just does with you what it wants to do with you, makes you feel what it wants to make you feel."
"Tango — Kurt Vonnegut

If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one. That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me. His name? Rob Roy. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Well here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment ... — Kurt Vonnegut

The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one. — Kurt Vonnegut

My God, the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was. — Kurt Vonnegut

You are who you pretend to be — Kurt Vonnegut

Where would you rather be tomorrow - on Mars or in the Kingdom of Heaven? — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

That women were more spiritual, more sacred than men. I still believe that about women. Is that, too, comical? — Kurt Vonnegut

The women in the play were really men, of course. The clock had just struck midnight and Cinderella was lamenting
'Goodness me, the clock has struck- Alackaday, and fuck my luck. — Kurt Vonnegut

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. — Kurt Vonnegut

I'd give my right arm to be enthusiastic. — Kurt Vonnegut

Old Noel Constant had never known anything about business, and neither had his son - and what little charm the Constants had evaporated the instant they pretended that their successes depended on their knowing their elbows from third base. — Kurt Vonnegut

Why so many of us knocked us major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were tring to give evolution a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains. — Kurt Vonnegut

Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what. — Kurt Vonnegut

It's a small world," I observed. "When you put it in a cemetery, it is. — Kurt Vonnegut

Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die. — Kurt Vonnegut

I was about to be attacked by a Doberman pinscher. He was a leading character in an earlier version of this book. *** — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As
machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and
feeble springs. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure. — Kurt Vonnegut

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about. — Michael Dirda

What did The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Uncle Tom's Cabin and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and all that have to do with our present enthusiasm for women's rights? Not that much, really. Women just got lucky this time. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

You're wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue. — Kurt Vonnegut

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers — Kurt Vonnegut

It wasn't that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can't say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.
They were people.
Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind. — Kurt Vonnegut

To be perfectly frank, his ding-dong wouldn't have been what you might call the subject of an exhaustive search. Albert — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'm not your destiny, or the Devil either!' I said. 'Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that's all the glory you deserve!' I said. 'That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves. — Kurt Vonnegut

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way. — Kurt Vonnegut

Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice. — Kurt Vonnegut

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. *** The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand - on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo? — Kurt Vonnegut

This is certainly that kind of masterpiece, and a new name should be created for such an all-frequencies assault on the sensibilities. I propose the name blivit. This is a word which during my adolescence was defined by peers as two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag. — Kurt Vonnegut

The arts, the arts, the arts - I don't know why it took me so long to realize how important they are. As a young man, I actually held them in supreme contempt. Now, whenever I think about them, I want to fall on my knees and weep. — Kurt Vonnegut

I am committing suicide by cigarette, I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn't. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells. — Kurt Vonnegut

And Castle nodded sagely. 'So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn't agree more.'
'Do you really agree?' I asked. 'A minute ago you said something about Jesus.'
'Who?' said Castle.
'Jesus Christ?'
'Oh,' said Castle. 'Him.' He shrugged. '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.'
'I see.' I knew I wasn't going to have an easy time writing a popular article about him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought and said. — Kurt Vonnegut

Here it is, the end of the world; and here I am, almost the very last man; and there it is, the highest mountain in sight. I know now what my karass has been up to, Newt. It's been working night and day for maybe half a million years to get me up that mountain." I wagged my head and nearly wept. "But what, for the love of God, is supposed to be in my hands?" I looked out of the car window blindly as — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. — Kurt Vonnegut

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. — Kurt Vonnegut

Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another. Said he didn't want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore. Name was Breed. I asked him if he was any relation to the boss of the fugging Research Laboratory. He said he fugging well was. Said he was the boss of the Research Laboratory's fugging son. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones. — Kurt Vonnegut

If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The government satirizes itself. All we can wish is that there will be a large number of Americans who will realize how dumb this all is, and how greedy and how vicious. Such an audience is dwindling all the time because of TV. — Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet? — Kurt Vonnegut

Dwayne's real mother was a spinster school teacher who wrote sentimental poetry and claimed to be descended from Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a king. His real father was an itinerant typesetter, who seduced his mother by setting her poems in type. He didn't sneak them into a newspaper or anything. It was enough for her that they were set in type. — Kurt Vonnegut

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'. — Kurt Vonnegut

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer. — Kurt Vonnegut

I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books. — Kurt Vonnegut

While we were being bombed in Dresden sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it. — Kurt Vonnegut

Then the soldiers relaxed in ranks, as though given the order at ease. Their obligations under this order were to relax, but to keep their feet in place, and to keep silent. The soldiers were free to think a little now, and to look around and to send messages with their eyes, if they had messages and could find receivers. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said. — Kurt Vonnegut

I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower. — Lorde

The record, said Finnerty, and he seemed satisfied with the toast. He had got what he wanted from the revolution, Paul supposed
a chance to give a savage blow to a close little society that made no comfortable place for him. — Kurt Vonnegut

As for the pursuit of happiness on this planet: I was as happy as any human being in history. "Thank God," I thought, "that cigarette was only a dream. — Kurt Vonnegut

Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a time machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.
Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.
Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it. So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut

To give an extra dimension to the scolding she gave me: The word "twerp" was freshly coined in those days, and had a specific definition - it was a person, if I may be forgiven, who bit the bubbles of his own farts in a bathtub. — Kurt Vonnegut

The armed forces knew he was a homosexual, that he was certain to fall in love with other fighting men, and the armed forces didn't want to put up with such love affairs. — Kurt Vonnegut

The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic, with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution. — Kurt Vonnegut

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. — Kurt Vonnegut

I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
"Lie down, lie down!" the people cried.
"The great machine is history!"
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left history far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don't think so.
We went to see where history'd been,
And my, the dead did stink so. — Kurt Vonnegut

They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled. — Kurt Vonnegut

He also began to suspect, since he was so much busier than anybody else, that he was the leader — Kurt Vonnegut

A lamb was a young animal which was legendary for sleeping well on the planet Earth. — Kurt Vonnegut

Her pleasure went on and on, and so did Ben's. Ben could almost smell the gardenia, could almost see her pinning it on, her hands all thumbs.
"You're selling your store?" she said.
There was radiance between them now. There were overtones and undertones to everything they said. The talk itself was formal, lifeless.
"Money Talks — Kurt Vonnegut

How embarrassing it is to be human. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I found my spirit wanted to choose between only two things - suicide, or the dreams I'd had in my youth. I am an old fool who borrowed the dreams of a young fool. — Kurt Vonnegut

Dear Friends: As one who has experimented extensively with life in the home and community, using real people in true-life situations, I doubt that any playthings could prepare a child for one millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not. — Kurt Vonnegut

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued t think of ordinary human beings as machines. — Kurt Vonnegut

Life goes on- and a fool and his self respect are soon parted ... — Kurt Vonnegut

What rioters, out of control, are really protesting about is life itself. Most people do not like it, it's humiliating for almost everyone. — Kurt Vonnegut

There's a Chaplain who never visited the front. — Kurt Vonnegut

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. — Kurt Vonnegut

It's just a hell of a time to be alive, — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument. — Kurt Vonnegut

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it. — Kurt Vonnegut