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" People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say. "

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" 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. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Survival

Think

Glory

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

" Never index your own book. "

" During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school. "

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

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

" 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

" Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God. "

" 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. "

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

" Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Frustration

Laughter

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

" What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. "

" 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. "

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

" Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951. "

" 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

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

" 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

" One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is. "

" Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone. "

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

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

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

" This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow? "

" I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Him

Dog

" 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? "

" People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God. "

" It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead. "

" True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. "