Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was--if you couldnt run a machine. A duel was under way.

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

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir. he read, You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, read Dwayne. Why wouldnt you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasnt meant to be reasonable.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives…. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

I hear he liked flowers pretty well.Yes, said Annie, he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him.--Out, Brief Candle

We went to the New York Worlds Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks.

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education.She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.