Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.was an American author. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth11 November 1922
CountryUnited States of America
mistake bye bokonon
It is never a mistake to say good-bye.
tuxedos knows invited
Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo
crowds cheated felt
The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.
thinking people slaughterhouse-five
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.
mother nice school
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 wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.
writing two people
That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.
father war teaching
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 that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’ I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.
careful pretend
We are all what we pretend to be, but, we had better be very careful what we pretend.
cynical exercise idealism iraq knowledge leaves mistaken optimism proud tired vietnam virtue
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.
almighty god good hate hates himself imagine plenty reasons
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
figure
A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army.
anywhere clause crooked eager shortage though
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.
asimov behave fiction great honorary humanist isaac president rewards science society succeeded utterly writer
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
distressed funny ghastly people
When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.