Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we’re being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it’s over.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.