Quote

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Kurt Vonnegut

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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.
World
Speak
Write
Stories
Persons
Pneumonia
Person
Window
Writing
Please
Make
Open
Love
Story

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
In this world, you get what you pay for.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
How embarrassing it is to be human.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
There are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.
Kurt Vonnegut