Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Quotes (18 Quotes)

How embarassing to be human.

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.

He is full of murderousresentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

We are what we pretend to be, but we better be very careful what we pretend.

Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch everything stops.

You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that the wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freashly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God ' I said to myself, 'it's the Children's Crusade.'

Find a subject you care about and which you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.

I'd rather have written 'Cheers' than anything I've written.

... hummings and clickings could be heardthe sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

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

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

There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.