Explore Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.

I would not be interested in writing if I didn't feel that what I wrote was an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End.

Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it’s you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.

No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow.

What passes for culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials.

I am better now. Word of honour: I am better now.

. . . hummings and clickings could be heard-the sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.

Out in the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nation functionaries and diplomats!

Luck is not the hand of God.... Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.