Top 100 Vonnegut's Quotes
#1. Vonnegut's earliest novels hint strongly at his familiarity with Wiener's work, The Human Use of Human Beings, especially his first novel, Player Piano (1952), which shows his concern for the social implications of automation, the replacement of human beings with machines.
David Porush
#2. Dystopian Cybernetic Environment in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
Ruzbeh Babaee
#3. The first article carrying Vonnegut's byline, 'This Business of Whistle Purchasing,' a lighthearted criticism of a school fund-raiser, was submitted at the urging of his sophomore English teacher.
Charles J. Shields
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.
Jerry Garcia
#8. There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.
Ruth Ozeki
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. On the strength of Vonnegut's reputation, 'Breakfast of Champions' spent a year on the best-seller lists, proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money.
Charles J. Shields
#12. Engaging and well paced, the book fills in the reality behind Vonnegut's work
Charles J. Shields
#13. 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
#14. 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.
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache.
Kurt Vonnegut
#21. No sense in a man with writer's block going to New York.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Keep breathing," said Ben. "That's the big thing for now."
"Money Talks
Kurt Vonnegut
#27. It's all such crap," she said. "I find this magazine called People in garbage cans," she said, "but it isn't about people. It's about crap.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. Just 'cause something makes you feel better than anything else, that don't mean it's good for you.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#29. And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Kurt Vonnegut
#30. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#31. And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.
Kurt Vonnegut
#32. Look at him! That's life, according to the medical profession. Isn't life wonderful?
Kurt Vonnegut
#33. A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy's body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.
Kurt Vonnegut
#34. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. But the "Get Tough America" policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, has earned us a name for obscene brutality, and cost the World the possibility of Germany's becoming a peaceful and intellectually fruitful nation in anything but the most remote future.
Kurt Vonnegut
#36. What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.
Kurt Vonnegut
#38. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
#39. The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him
news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same.
Kurt Vonnegut
#40. As I spoke of another's love and looked into the wide, blue windows of her soul, a rich, insistent yearning flooded my senses.
Tango
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. It couldn't have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It's having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are.
Kurt Vonnegut
#42. That's a mistake,' he said. 'You miss an awful lot of life that way. That's why you Yankees are so cold,' he said. 'You think too much. That's why you marry so seldom.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver.
I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
#44. I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. The value of their money was imaginary. Like the nature of the universe itself, the desirability of their American dollars and yen was all in people's heads.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. Eliot had only one pair of shoes, black ones. They had a crackle finish as a result of an experiment. Eliot once tried to polish them with Johnson's Glo-Coat, which was a floorwax, not intended for shoes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#47. The fat woman's expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. I've been living alone for so long, everything about me's private. I'm surprised anyone's able to understand a word I say.
Kurt Vonnegut
#49. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
#50. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That's all right. I like to have my heart broken.
Kurt Vonnegut
#51. The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's."
Bokonon's paraphrase was this:
"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.
Kurt Vonnegut
#52. They had found a can of white paint, and on the front doors of the cab Frank had painted white stars, and on the roof he had painted the letters of a granfalloon: U.S.A.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#53. It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.
Mark Vonnegut
#54. 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
#55. The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm
Kurt Vonnegut
#56. Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors!
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. It's probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well.
Mark Vonnegut
#58. But that's fetishism, I think, writing books to write books.
Kurt Vonnegut
#59. Hello, out there, Heinz, in case you read this.
I was really very fond of you, to the extend that I am capable of being fond of anybody.
Give the Blarney Stone a kiss for me.
What were you doing in Hitler's bunker - looking for your motorcycle and your best friend?
Kurt Vonnegut
#60. So long, old pal. You're going to a different world now. It's sure to be a better one, since no other world could be as bad as this one is.
Kurt Vonnegut
#61. People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We're behaving abominably. It's like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, "I think Uncle Charlie's off his rocker." We are behaving in a bizarre manner.
Kurt Vonnegut
#62. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. When he was with Finnerty he liked to pretend that he shared the man's fantastic and alternately brilliant or black inner thoughts - almost as though he were discontent with his own relative tranquility.
Kurt Vonnegut
#64. I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd.
Kurt Vonnegut
#65. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side,
Kurt Vonnegut
#66. I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
Kurt Vonnegut
#67. It's a big enough job just burying the dead, without trying to draw a moral from each death
Kurt Vonnegut
#68. You boys ain't got it so bad," he said to his rigid squadmates. "You oughta see how we treat the generals, if you think you's bad off.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. You are being suffocated by tradition ... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art
it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
Kurt Vonnegut
#70. You would think that a man who's spent as much time in the theater as I have would know when the proper time came for the hero to die-if he was to be a hero. I missed my cue for the great suicide scene
Kurt Vonnegut
#71. An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm could be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einsten's very similar formula: 'E equals MC squared'?
Kurt Vonnegut
#72. I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting.
Conor Oberst
#73. The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.
Kurt Vonnegut
#74. I am reminded of one of my father's novels, The Era of Hopeful Monsters. It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment.
Kurt Vonnegut
#75. Anybody who has traveled this far on a fool's errand," said Salo, "has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by completing the errand.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#76. He tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.
Kurt Vonnegut
#77. Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.
Kurt Vonnegut
#78. There was absolutely nothing, not even nothing. And then there was this great Big Bang. And that's where all this crap came from.
Kurt Vonnegut
#79. Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.
Kurt Vonnegut
#80. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it babies, you've go to be kind".
Kurt Vonnegut
#81. Unannounced changes in life's itinerary are like dancing lessons from God.
Kurt Vonnegut
#82. The difference between my fans and Kurt's is that my fans know they're mentally ill.
Kurt Vonnegut
#83. That's what is was to be young - to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#84. Unk, you crazy son-of-a-bitch, I love you. I think you are the cat's pajamas.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. Maybe it's different chemicals that different countries eat that makes people act in different ways at different times,
Kurt Vonnegut
#86. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
#87. It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.
Kurt Vonnegut
#88. I'll tell you what the human soul is, Mary,' he whispered, his eyes closed. 'Animals don't have one. It's the part of you that knows when your brain isn't working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but I always knew.
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.
Kurt Vonnegut
#90. Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#91. He had a dazzling talent for spending millions without increasing mankind's stores of anything but chagrin.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#92. He will not hate. He will not kill. There's hope in that. There's no hope in war.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#93. That's the attractive thing about war," said Rosewater. "Absolutely everybody gets a little something.
Kurt Vonnegut
#94. As Richard Pryor was to Eddie Murphy, that's what Kurt Vonnegut was to me.
Christopher Moore
#95. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
#96. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.
Mark Vonnegut
#97. You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert - see? He's facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies." So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#98. Thomas Jefferson High
School [..] His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of
the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.
Kurt Vonnegut
#99. (speaking of insecurity)
"It's broken greater spirits than ours, and robbed the world of God knows how much beauty. I've seen it happen more times than I like to think about."
"$10,000 A Year, Easy
Kurt Vonnegut
#100. After that demonstration everybody was thinking, what's going to happen to these wonderful men who have been so useful to us? We have to give people something to do with life.
Kurt Vonnegut
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
