Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

"I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex."

"‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."

"Skyscraper National Park"

"Flashlight beams danced crazily"

"My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite."

"The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck. As the tag line of my favorite dirty joke would have it: "Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here."

"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water."

"He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his."

"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions."

"When things are going really well, we should take time to notice it."

"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time."

"The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears."

"So the people of Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly for the Elders, so the Elders put it into the people's heads that they themselves were the life forms that were supposed to spread out through the Universe. This was a preposterous ideas, of course. In the words of a nameless author: "How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? It was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store."

"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."

"She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars."

"We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine."

"And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)"

"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."

"I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with"