1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

I saw a huge steam roller, It blotted out the sun. The people all lay down, lay down; They did not try to run. My love and I, we looked amazed Upon the gory mystery. "Lie down, lie down!" the people cried. "The great machine is history!" My love and I, we ran away, The engine did not find us. We ran up to a mountain top, Left history far behind us. Perhaps we should have stayed and died, But somehow we don't think so. We went to see where history'd been, And my, the dead did stink so.

This is a nation tragedy, of course - that we've changed from a society to an audience.

Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!

If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

I can see where influential people would like Maharishi better than Jesus. My God, if the Beatles and Mia Farrow went to Jesus, He'd tell them to give all their money away.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

[I write] intuitively, reflexively, as if skiing down a steep mountain slope with no time to think.

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.