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" Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Men

Easy

Meaning

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" My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Cash

Business

" The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest. "

" I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government. "

" New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become. "

" We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. "

" Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia. "

" I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. "

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

" I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival. "

" I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest. "

Kurt Vonnegut

System

Quest

" It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Character

Create

" I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station. "

" I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins. "

" I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this. "

" Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Armor

Person

" People need good lies. There are too many bad ones. "

" 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. "

" I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see. "

" Never index your own book. "

" I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers. "

" I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people. "

" Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. "

" I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours. "

" I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. "

" Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Did

Jonah

" If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy. "

" Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time? "

" The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth. "

" Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be. "

" I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Think

People