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" 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. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Soldier

Said

Done

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

Kurt Vonnegut

Cash

Business

" 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. "

" If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind. "

" 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. "

" All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Kurt Vonnegut

Did

Jonah

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

" 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'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. "

" Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee. "

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

" Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Left

" One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand. "

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

" There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord. "

" About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm. "

" 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. "

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

" This country is being managed to death, being public related to death. "

Kurt Vonnegut

Country

Public

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

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

" 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

" 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. "