Quotes by kurt vonnegut

“But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all t...”

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very h...”

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”

“The mind reels.”

“I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are orang...”

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on f...”

“I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didnt have to write at all anymore if I didnt want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I dont know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, wh...”

“profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.”

“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.”

“My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.”

“A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.”

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

“The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I...”

“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”

“This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbor...”

“You cant write novels without a touch of paranoia. Im paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.”

“People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they s...”