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
powerful stuff expecting
Truth can be really powerful stuff if you're not expecting it.
country powerful nice
Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.
power thinking brain
Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
close effective power
Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.
awful english good kindly order physical power professor rather sciences studied writer wrote
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
cannot deal grumpy offended perhaps rather seen terms
I used to be funny, and perhaps I'm not anymore. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I've seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter.
fix peace prospects war winners
THE WINNERS ARE AT WAR WITH THE LOSERS, AND THE FIX IS ON. THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE ARE AWFUL.
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.
admire christ extremely god hell human jesus matter speaks spoke whether
Well, to admire the hell out of Jesus Christ or of everyone who speaks well. And, well my grandfather said is-- if-- what Jesus said was marvelous. What does it matter whether he was God or not? And it doesn't matter. So this is a human being who spoke extremely well, and we humanists listened.
arrogance conquer deserve mean
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.
careful pretend
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
bird himself life man sit tiger
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
bush line sue
Bush used that line recently. I should sue him for plagiarism.
heart missed purple surviving
But doing that job, surviving it, was like getting a Purple Heart. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.