Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007) was an American novelist and short-story writer. This major voice in American literature was celebrated for his insightful, satirical depictions of the horrors and the ironies of 20th-century civilization.
Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut served in the air force in World War II, was detained by the Germans, and endured the bombing of Dresden in 1945. He used this experience in his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade (1969.)
Much of Vonnegut’s literature is characterized by a fatalistic worldview that embraces modern humanist values. Highlighting the comic absurdity of the human condition, he frequently portrayed characters who search for meaning and order in a meaningless and disordered world.
Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952,) depicts a New York factory town whose mechanized make-up turns its workers and scientists into near-robots. Other notable novels include Cat’s Cradle (1963,) Breakfast of Champions (1973,) Slapstick (1976,) Jailbird (1979,) Deadeye Dick (1983,) and Hocus Pocus (1991.)
Vonnegut’s short stories were collected in Welcome to the Monkey House (1968.) He also published two collections of essays and speeches, Fates Worse than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Kurt Vonnegut
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
Topics: Communication, Foresight
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: World
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Aging, Laughter, Disappointment
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
Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they’re doing.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: America
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.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Learning, Caution
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Age, Class
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Dance, Dancing
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: History
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to have without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Racism
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
—Kurt Vonnegut
Einstein’s E=mc2 is an extraordinary concept. So radical: matter and energy are two phases of the same sort of general stuff. There’s only one other idea that radical: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Forgiveness
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
Topics: The Mind, Mind
Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too. … .
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Writing
There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
—Kurt Vonnegut
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Appearance, Being True to Yourself
We are all what we pretend to be, but, we had better be very careful what we pretend.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: People
It was a thunderingly beautiful experience—voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Space
We are what we imagine ourselves to be.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Imagination
We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Illusion
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Science Fiction
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
—Kurt Vonnegut
You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Writers
If somebody says, “I love you,” to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? “I love you, too. “
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Love
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.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be.
—Kurt Vonnegut
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.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Information, Carpe-diem
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
Topics: The Military
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.
—Kurt Vonnegut
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Politics, Politicians
There’s only one me, and I’m stuck with him.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Self-love
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It’s a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: War
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 nutcases want to be president.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I’d rather have written “Cheers” than anything I’ve written.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Opportunities, Reality
this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me! Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Faith
The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Concentration, Focus
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion … . I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Topics: Earth
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