Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

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.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

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

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

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.

Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF
HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed.

He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold.

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

Make love when you can. It's good for you.

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. 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."

What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.

I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

No grown woman is a fan of premature ejaculation.

The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me."The big show is inside my head," I said.

Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Why don't you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!

If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

"I wish I had been born a bird instead," he said."I wish we had all been born birds instead."

I think yet again of my father, who struggled to become a painter after he was forced into early and unwelcome retirement by the Great Depression. He has reason to be optimistic about his new career, since the early stages of his pictures, whether still or portraits or landscapes, were full of pow. Mother, meaning to be helpful, would say of each one: "That's really wonderful, Kurt. Now all you have to do is finish it." He would then ruin it. I remember a portrait he did of his only brother, Alex, who was an insurance salesman, which he called "Special Agent". When he roughed it in, his hand and eye conspired with a few bold strokes to capture several important truths about Alex, including a hint of disappointment. Uncle Alex was a proud graduate of Harvard, who would rather have been a scholar of literature than an insurance man.When Father finished the portrait, made sure every square inch of masonite had its share of paint, Uncle Alex had disappeared entirely. We had a drunk and lustful Queen Victoria instead. This was terrible.

You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do.

You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.

Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.