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" 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. "

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

Kurt Vonnegut

Comfort

Think

Speed

" The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. "

" Never index your own book. "

" 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 now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it. "

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

" All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. "

" I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. "

" If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so. "

" Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say? "

" When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them. "

" Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. "

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

" 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. "

" That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time. "

" I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center. "

" Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. "

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

" If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own. "

" Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. "

" There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. "

" A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. "

" I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that. "

" I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us. "

" 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. "

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

" It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment. "

" 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. "

" Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do. "

" There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia. "