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Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 11
Died: 2007
Died: April 14
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Kurt Vonnegut
Jr.
Also
Planet
Earth
Planets
Live
Streets
Petrified
Life
Worth
Trout
Second
Forty
Common
Iron
Living
Combination
Given
Street

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
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Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.
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The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.
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Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.
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The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.
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Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
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After that demonstration everybody was thinking, what's going to happen to these wonderful men who have been so useful to us? We have to give people something to do with life.
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My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.
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Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Kurt Vonnegut
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And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.
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Life is no way to treat an animal.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.
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I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.
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We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.
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Son--they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
Kurt Vonnegut