1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence. Circe Berman: Who isn't?.

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that." "My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a wimpering, simpering child I am.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

Start [writing] as close to the end as possible.

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.