Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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Kurt Vonnegut

Profession : Writer

Birth : November 11, 1922

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

Kurt Vonnegut

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

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

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

Kurt Vonnegut

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

Kurt Vonnegut

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

Kurt Vonnegut

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

Kurt Vonnegut

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Kurt Vonnegut

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Kurt Vonnegut

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Kurt Vonnegut

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

Kurt Vonnegut

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Kurt Vonnegut

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

Kurt Vonnegut

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

Kurt Vonnegut

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Kurt Vonnegut

I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.

Kurt Vonnegut