Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

152. “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

153. “If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

155. “Thinking doesn’t seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

156. “Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

157. “You are pooped and demoralised,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

158. “The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

159. “Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

160. “There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

161. “Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

162. “The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

163. “We’d been apart so long – I’d been dead so long,” she said in English. “I thought surely you’d built a new life, with no room in it for me. I’d hoped that.” “My life is nothing but room for you.” I said. “It could never be filled by anyone but you.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

164. “The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

165. “Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

166. “You can’t fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

167. “Any scientist who can’t explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

168. “Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

169. “How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

170. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

171. “A lot of critics think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

172. “I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

173. “Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

174. “If people insist on living as if there’s no tomorrow, there really won’t be one.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

175. “I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, “Please – a little less love, and a little more common decency.””

— Kurt Vonnegut

176. “What is my definition of jazz? “Safe sex of the highest order.””

— Kurt Vonnegut

177. “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

178. “Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

179. “It is just an illusion 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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

180. “Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

181. “I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I’m doing good, and them I’m doing good for know I’m doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

182. “My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

183. “The complicated futility of ignorance.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

184. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart 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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

185. “History! Read it and weep!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

186. “Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

187. “Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

188. “If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

189. “What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don’t mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

190. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

191. “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

192. “A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

193. “There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

194. “Truth can be really powerful stuff if you’re not expecting it.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

195. “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.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

196. “The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

197. “If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

198. “There is no WHY, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in Amber.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

199. “If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

200. “During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.”

— Kurt Vonnegut