Kurt Vonnegut

If this isn't nice, what is?

Why throw money at problems? That's what money is for.Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

"If I'd wasted my time creating characters," Trout said, "I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in."

Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

I am eternally grateful [...] for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

Slaughterhouse-Five has been turned

Into an opera by a young German,

And will have its premiere in Munich this June.

I’m not going there either.

Not interested.

I am fond of Occam’s Razor,

Or the Law of Parsimony, which suggests

That the simplest explanation of a phenomenon

Is usually the most trustworthy.

And I now believe, with David’s help,

That writer’s block is finding out

How lives of loved ones really ended

Instead of the way we hoped they would end

With the help of our body English.

Fiction is body English.

Kilgore's Creed: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

Artists [...] are people who say "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"

As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

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

Xanthippe thought her husband, Socrates, was a fool. Aunt Raye thought Uncle Alex was a fool. Mother thought Father was a fool. My wife thinks I am a fool. Wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.