Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief.For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died—to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.

The mind reels.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who dont want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

You can’t write novels without a touch of paranoia. I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

When I write, I feel like an armless leg less man with a crayon in his mouth.

The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, its hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.

The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. Ill tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.Plutonium! Now theres the stuff to put hair on a microbes chest.

What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.

Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.

Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know wholl get one.

If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth— those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for any-thing and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.

It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really dont damage children much. They didnt damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

Yes, and our sisters sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere. The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: It isnt the museum, it should be. The museums in childrens minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from eternal grief.

I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.

I dont know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment

I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it--love yourself

Dont forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.