Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

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.

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

That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [...] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.

It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine.

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order."

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.

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

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.