Quotes by kurt vonnegut

“I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how tobecome a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt yourparents, and you don't have the nerve to be a ...”

“Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times...”

“Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.”

“I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching t...”

“As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out someth...”

“It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.”

“So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts...”

“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 becomi...”

“Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.”

“Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question.”

“It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered childr...”

“Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays...”

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem...”

“I am committing suicide by cigarette, I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didnt. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks.”

“The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.”

“Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any pri...”

“That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain".”

“You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.”

“Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasnt that she was ugly, or h...”

“...a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.”