Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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Kurt Vonnegut

Profession : Writer

Birth : November 11, 1922

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

Kurt Vonnegut

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

Kurt Vonnegut

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.

Kurt Vonnegut

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

Kurt Vonnegut

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

Kurt Vonnegut

Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Kurt Vonnegut

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

Kurt Vonnegut

My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.

Kurt Vonnegut

Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

Kurt Vonnegut

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

Kurt Vonnegut

Never index your own book.

Kurt Vonnegut

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

Kurt Vonnegut

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

Kurt Vonnegut

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

Kurt Vonnegut

Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.

Kurt Vonnegut

If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

Kurt Vonnegut

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.

Kurt Vonnegut