Kurt Vonnegut

It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now.

If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, "art or not," you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. [...] The situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. [...] There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. [...] If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game. Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not their pictureness. [...]

There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.

You want to know why I don’t have AIDS, why I'm not HIV-positive like so many other people? I don’t fuck around. It’s as simple as that.

Western Civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.

All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

I thank [Kilgore] Trout for the concept of the man-woman hour as a unit of measurement of marital intimacy. This is an hour during which a husband and wife are close enough to be aware of each other, and for one to say something to the other without yelling, if he or she feels like it. Trout says in his story "Golden Wedding" that they needn't feel like saying anything in order to credit themselves with a man-woman hour. [...][A character in Trout's story] calculates that an average couple with separate places of work logs four man-woman hours each weekday, and sixteen of them on the weekends. Being asleep with each other doesn't count. This gives him a standard man-woman week of thirty-six man-woman hours.He multiplies that by fifty-two. This gives him, when rounded off, a standard man-woman year of eighteen hundred man-woman hours. He advertises that any couple that has accumulated this many man-woman hours is entitled to celebrate an anniversary...

There is a planet in the solar system, where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn't figure that out until five hundred years ago!

I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to be. They munch. They ruminate. If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it.

I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.

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