Top 100 Quotes About Kurt Vonnegut
#1. I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.
Etgar Keret
#2. I want the people of New Jersey to jump off a cliff like Kurt Vonnegut so I can show them how to fly. This way, nobody needs to grow any wings, which would be impossible anyway because we're humans and not some kind of bird.
Richie Sambora
#3. Dystopian Cybernetic Environment in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
Ruzbeh Babaee
#4. I really began to love to read while in high school, and my favorite authors were my heroes: J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut.
Louis Sachar
#5. For us the Dresden Dolls were porcelain dolls that were made in that city at the time, that is what they were to us, and also a reference in Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, and in a song by The Fall.
Brian Viglione
#6. For example, if she joined the book club - there was always a book club - and hung out with them, her choice of guys would be limited to the dark and moody Chuck Palahniuk/Kurt Vonnegut/Life-Sucks-and-Then-You-Die brooders.
Pete Hautman
#7. I think a reading group should have a snappy name to attract members, don't you?'
Mr Peterson didn't ask about my snappy name, but I could tell his curiosity was piqued.
'The Secular Church of Kurt Vonnegut,' I said.
'Jesus F Christ,' said Mr Peterson.
Gavin Extence
#8. As Richard Pryor was to Eddie Murphy, that's what Kurt Vonnegut was to me.
Christopher Moore
#9. Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer, 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.
Justin Halpern
#10. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things - the people on the edge see them first." - Kurt Vonnegut
Timothy Ferriss
#11. Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.
Chris Crutcher
#12. If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.
Chuck Palahniuk
#13. Billy Pilgrim: "You guys go on without me. I'll be alright."
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
#14. We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'
John Green
#15. Life is nothing but high school. - Kurt Vonnegut
Alice Pung
#16. I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace.
Michael Dirda
#17. 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
#18. I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity.
Michael Dirda
#19. Going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.
John Green
#20. I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball's chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.
Pete Seeger
#21. Kurt Vonnegut speaking to John Irving while Irving was administering the Heimlich maneuver in response to Vonnegut's uncontrollable coughing ... John,stop- I am not choking. I have emphysema.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.
Mark Vonnegut
#23. I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.
D. B. Weiss
#24. This is Kurt Vonnegut in the effing state-of-the-art lethal injection facility in Huntsville, effing, Texas signing off.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#25. The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it.
Meena Kandasamy
#26. Never refuse an invitation. - told to me by Kurt Vonnegut in 1975
H. Max Hiller
#27. Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut's infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat's Cradle.
David Quammen
#28. Kurt Vonnegut wasn't a chatty guy, but when he spoke, it was always clear and very funny, in the way that he wrote, in a very specific kind of combination of word groupings and expressions that lived somewhere else.
Susan Sarandon
#29. I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower.
Lorde
#30. My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut - he's my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don't really remember what we talked about.
Steven Wright
#31. It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
Haruki Murakami
#33. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
Kurt Vonnegut
#34. Twenty-fours hours of sleeplessness had made her, in my eyes, anyway, and idealized representation of compassionate, long-suffering women of all ages everywhere.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. SOMETIMES THE POOL-PAH," Bokonon tells us, "exceeds the power of humans to comment." Bokonon translates pool-pah at one point in The Books of Bokonon as "shit storm" and at another point as "wrath of God.
Kurt Vonnegut
#36. Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. Guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret and to get out of bodies every time there's an air raid or the enemy fires a rocket or something.
Kurt Vonnegut
#38. Indianapolis, Indiana," said Constant, "is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who'll hang a white man for murdering an Indian - " said Constant, "that's the kind of people for me." Salo's
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#39. A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
Kurt Vonnegut
#40. And please note," he went on, "that when I gave you that priceless piece of information, my fingers were crossed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. I didn't know then what a sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles
champions every one.
Kurt Vonnegut
#42. To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
Kurt Vonnegut
#44. A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children, and both of his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. You'll pardon me," said Beatrice, "if I fail to appreciate sarcasm and all the other brilliant nuances of your no doubt famous wit, Mr. Constant[ ... ]
Kurt Vonnegut
#49. Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; "Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; 'Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did -'" Et cetera. -NOBLE CLAGGETT (1947-1966)
Kurt Vonnegut
#50. Aren't the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn't get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt.
Kurt Vonnegut
#51. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
Kurt Vonnegut
#52. Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Kurt Vonnegut
#53. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
#54. Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
Kurt Vonnegut
#55. There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest
and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.
Kurt Vonnegut
#56. Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#58. He felt guilty about that, even though he knew he had done nothing he should feel guilty about.
Kurt Vonnegut
#60. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut
#62. I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.
Kurt Vonnegut
#64. It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.
Kurt Vonnegut
#65. 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.
#66. And the winner of the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-7 Garland.
Kurt Vonnegut
#67. What I want you to try and find out is, is there anything special going on or is it all just as crazy as it looked to me ?
Kurt Vonnegut
#68. The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.
Bomar
Kurt Vonnegut
#70. I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
Kurt Vonnegut
#71. About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good?
Kurt Vonnegut
#72. I shouldn't be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams
Kurt Vonnegut
#75. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut
#76. You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.
Kurt Vonnegut
#77. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.
Kurt Vonnegut
#78. If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.
Kurt Vonnegut
#79. The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
Kurt Vonnegut
#80. No American is so old and poor and friend-less that he cannot make a collection of some of the most exquisite little ironies in town.
Kurt Vonnegut
#81. No sense in a man with writer's block going to New York.
Kurt Vonnegut
#82. The cold goblin spring of the crocuses was past.
The frail and chilly fairy spring of the daffodils was past.
The springtime for mankind had arrived, and the blooms of the lilac bowers outside Redwine's church hung flatly, heavy as Concord grapes.
Kurt Vonnegut
#83. He's meeting his girl now, a girl not much older than 14. A five-and-ten-cents store Cleopatra, a four letter word.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.
Kurt Vonnegut
#86. You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#87. Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.
Kurt Vonnegut
#88. High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten ... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#90. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...
Kurt Vonnegut
#91. Keep breathing," said Ben. "That's the big thing for now."
"Money Talks
Kurt Vonnegut
#92. Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on 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." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things
the people on the edge see them first.
Kurt Vonnegut
#93. Americans ... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.
Kurt Vonnegut
#94. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#97. Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play.
Kurt Vonnegut
#98. The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England.
Kurt Vonnegut
#99. I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought. I
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#100. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.
Kurt Vonnegut
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