Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Im screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because Im funnier than a lot of people, I think, and thats appreciated by young people.

When Im being funny, I try not to offend. I dont think much of what Ive done has been in really ghastly taste. I dont think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heavens sake.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Still and all, why bother? Heres my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

“The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. Its 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”

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

“There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But youre right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isnt any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

“The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”

“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.”

“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.”

“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”

“Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.”

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”

“But people didnt have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”

“As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.”

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