Kurt Vonnegut

When I used to come home from school Mother used to ask me what happened that day, and I__ tell her,_ said Miss Pefko. __ow I come home from work and she asks me the same question, and all I can say is__ Miss Pefko shook her head and let her crimson lips flap slackly_ __ dunno, I dunno, I dunno.___f there__ something you don__ understand,_ urged Dr. Breed, __sk Dr. Horvath to explain it. He__ very good at explaining._ He turned to me. __r. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn__ explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.___hen I__ dumber than an eight-year-old,_ Miss Pefko mourned. __ don__ even know what a charlatan is.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

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

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

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

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.

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

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.