I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
"Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." was an Americans/American writer. His works, such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973), blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen, he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a Pacifism/pacifist intellectual, who often was critical of the society that he lived in. He was known for his Humanism/humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
The New York Times headline at the time of his death called him "the Counterculture of the 1960s/counterculture's novelist."
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous writers! More Kurt Vonnegut on Wikipedia.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.
The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
Still and all, why bother? Here's 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.
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
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.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Well, the telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?
All of the true things I'm about to tell you are shameless lies.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
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.
I am eternally grateful.. for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
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 say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'.
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
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