Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn’t let her. “Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?” she asked me. “The big show is inside my head,” I said.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

352. “Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

353. “I would have been dead if it weren’t for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

354. “Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

355. “I myself grew up when radio was very important. I’d come home from school and turn on the radio. There were funny comedians and wonderful music, and there were plays. I used to pass time with radio.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

356. “The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

357. “I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That’s why I served in World War II, and that’s why I wrote books.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

358. “I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can’t get out. And so I’m impatient with those who think that it’s easy for people to get out of trouble.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

359. “The only way to get anything out of a writer’s brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

360. “You develop a style from writing a lot.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

361. “His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

362. “Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

363. “You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

364. “Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but the living room in your fortified compound.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

365. “We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

366. “I’ve been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It’s just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

367. “I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

368. “It’s a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

369. “Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren’t they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

370. “All these years, I’ve been opening the window and making love to the world.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

371. “Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

372. “Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

373. “Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, Why just go ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

374. “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages – they haven’t ended yet.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

375. “What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

376. “Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

377. “There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

378. “The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

379. “As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

380. “If I wrote something that hadn’t really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That’s fraud!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

381. “The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

382. “The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

383. “You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

384. “Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard, President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the worlds ills can be traced to the fact that Mans knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

385. “Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

386. “I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it’s unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

387. “All right – I’ll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

388. “It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

389. “Son – they say there isn’t any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

390. “My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

391. “Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

392. “I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

393. “I was raised by a black maid by the name of Ida Young and I probably talked to her more than anybody, so whatever is nutty about me was nutty about her, too, I think because I saw a lot more of her than I did of my parents.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

394. “People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

395. “What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

396. “The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

397. “I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

398. “It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that’s one way to really shake up the family if you haven’t got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

399. “That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

400. “The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I’ve done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.”

— Kurt Vonnegut