Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

What is the purpose of life?...To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!

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

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

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.

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.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it.

Life is no way to treat an animal.

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

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy.

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.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

The people who taught really knew their stuff. My chemistry teacher, Frank Wade, was actually a chemist. I was so lucky in a number of ways.

There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

My ancient history teacher, Millie Lloyd, should have worn a medal for her performance at the battle of Thermopylae. She was excited and we were excited.

... life, by definition, is never still.

There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life.

It's a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.