Kurt Vonnegut Quotes - Page 2

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 write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:
ETC.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

The trouble with the world is that people are still superstitious instead of scientific. If everybody would study science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble there was.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

No chimpanzee husband would stand by while his wife lost all her coconuts.

Q: What is wrong with the world?
A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.

Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.