Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut

Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.

My god-life! who can understand eve one little minute of it? 'don't try' he said 'just pretend you understand.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

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.

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

There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.

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.

Those who live by electronics die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.

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

Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.

Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

After that demonstration everybody was thinking, what's going to happen to these wonderful men who have been so useful to us? We have to give people something to do with life.

They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.

Until you die .. it's all life.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

There are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.

It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries.

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.