I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .

The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

Nothing in this book is true.

I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books.

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Never index your own book.