Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before—in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested.

...Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it.So it goes.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if its only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando, he said to me, when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down. Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed--one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains. Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando. Why? I asked him. If you would write a book about that, he said, and give the answer to that question, that Why?--you would have a very great book. Do you know the answer? I said. No, he said, That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it. Any guesses? I said. No, he said, looking me straight in the eye, even though I was one of the ones who volunteered.He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me: There were loudspeakers all over the camp, he said, and they were never silent for long. There was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good music--sometimes the best. Thats interesting, I said. There was no music by Jews, he said. That was forbidden. Naturally, I said. And the music was always stopping in the middle, he said, and then there was an announcement. All day long, music and announcements. Very modern, I said. He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando. Oh? I said. Leichentärger zu Wache, he crooned, his eyes still closed. Translation: Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse.In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry. After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music, Gutman said to me, the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.

When things are going really well, we should take time to notice it.

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

Tis better to have love and lustThan to let our apparatus rust.

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the worlds champions.

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

Fear hadn’t come to him yet. Pain hadn’t come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last—the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring.

There are plenty of good reason for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Wheres evil? Its that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. Its that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. Its that part of an imbecile, I said, that punishes and vilifies and makes war.

Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.Our governments got a war on drugs....But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of time from when he was sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, thats the soul seeking some relief.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if its only a glass of water.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. Drugs were food, he said. I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food theyre hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesnt mean people on other planets shouldnt eat something else. On some planets Im sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwords. Then its time to eat stones again.