Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

452. “Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

453. “I couldn’t survive my own pessimism if I didn’t have some kind of sunny little dream.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

454. “No matter how wonderful a sentence is, if it doesn’t add new and useful information, it should be removed.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

455. “There is a strong feeling in the Middle West that the artist is not pulling his own weight no matter how hard he may work, that the other people are doing the real stuff.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

456. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

457. “The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s 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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

458. “His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand – passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

459. “It is harder to be unhappy when you are eating.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

460. “We’re a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that’s all. You can’t change history. History is happening to us now.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

461. “You are better than you think. A-one, a-two a-three.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

462. “All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

463. “Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

464. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

465. “I said I wasn’t interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn’t really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

466. “Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

467. “Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don’t. You don’t have to say why afterward. You don’t have to say anything.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

468. “Let there be nothing harmonious about our children’s playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

469. “It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

470. “Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

471. “The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

472. “I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

473. “I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

474. “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

475. “What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won’t know it.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

476. “I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

478. “In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

479. “Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

480. “Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

481. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

482. “The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

483. “Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

484. “No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

485. “If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

486. “Don’t worry about your father. He’s a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

487. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

488. “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

489. “People hate it when they’re tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it’s a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

490. “I’m not a drug salesman. I’m a writer.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

491. “Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

492. “The government satirizes itself. All we can wish is that there will be a large number of Americans who will realize how dumb this all is, and how greedy and how vicious. Such an audience is dwindling all the time because of TV.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

493. “I think jokes are a perfectly viable form of literature. Some critics take issue with me because I make my points and discuss my ideas with jokes, rather than with oceanic tragedy.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

494. “I wish you’d help me look into a more interesting problem – namely, my sanity.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

495. “There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

496. “Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

497. “Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

498. “Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

499. “Each one of us has to be what he or she is.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

500. “It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.”

— Kurt Vonnegut