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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.

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.
Imagine
Desk
Jobs
Desks
Tell
Showers
Truth
Impressed
Ideas
Unexpected
Contrasted
Insight
Clutter
Familiar
Insights
Simply
Shower

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
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When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.
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The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.
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You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind.
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You are better than you think.
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If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.
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I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any 'Good Old Days,' there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, 'Don't look at me. I just got here myself.'
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I think jokes are a perfectly viable form of literature. Some critics take issue with me because I make my points and discuss my ideas with jokes, rather than with oceanic tragedy.
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Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.
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I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books.
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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.
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...Skyscraper National Park
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That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.
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The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.
Kurt Vonnegut
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This is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
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