Top 1030 Quotes & Sayings by Kurt Vonnegut - Page 15

You become who you pretend to be.

It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.

Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.

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

He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

I am better now. Word of honour: I am better now.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.

A lover's a liar, To himself he lies, The truthful are loveless, Like oysters their eyes!

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.

I used my daughter's crayons for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.

Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.

Nothing in this book is true.

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer." "What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?

The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms.

You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

if there is a god, he sure hates people

The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.

No moral value is greater than humanity.

The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.

I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

I wish we had all been born birds instead.

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence. Circe Berman: Who isn't?.

He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer." Castle was respectful.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything.

How’s the patient?” asked Derby. “Dead to the world.” “But not actually dead.” “No.” “How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.

... humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.

The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.

The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.

We are what we pretend to be.

Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

The name of the new religion, said Rumfoord, is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. . . The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar.

Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; "Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; 'Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did -'" Et cetera. -NOBLE CLAGGETT (1947-1966)

But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.

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.

Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into am emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past

I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.

Take care of the people, and God Almighty will take care of Himself.

What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers