Kurt Vonnegut

A seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon . Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

Every passing hour brings the Solar Systemforty-three thousand miles closer to GlobularCluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

The only way to get anything out of a writer’s brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

[A] nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Fuller’s cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree, frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger.

One [television] program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.

Those who live by electronics die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.

I concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money.

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

A boat to your average woman is just one more damn house to take care of, only it’s more uncomfortable, and the man orders her around like Captain Bligh, and she doesn’t trust the machinery or the plumbing, and she has to walk six blocks to buy groceries or to get the laundry done.

Puritanism had fallen into such disrepair that not even the oldest spinster thought of putting Susanna in a ducking stool; not even the oldest farmer suspected that Susanna’s diabolical beauty had made his cow run dry.

Television wrecked the short-story branch of the industry, and now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on someone’s first novel is good money down a rat hole.

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

I mean jazz. 1 don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.

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.

She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.

For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.

Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained.

What could be more essential in a pluralistic society like ours than that every citizen see dignity in every other human being everywhere?

Of course, one dictionary is as good as another to most people, who use them for spellers and bet-settlers and accessories to crossword puzzles and Scrabble games.

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else.

When I call on a client, I come by cab, and I am sleek and clean and foursquare. I carry myself as though I’ve made a quiet killing on the stock market, and have come to call more as a public service than anything else.

The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.

[His] mentality was one that had been remarked upon as being peculiarly American since the nation had been born—the restless, erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer.

How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Here?s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

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

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

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