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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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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
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Come
Rose
Country
Son
Like
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More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.
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Well here you are, there it is, THIS is what it's all about.
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Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.
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Words may deeply wound us, but we must run that risk to be free.
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You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow.
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People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.
Kurt Vonnegut
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When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, It is done. People did not like it here.
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Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived.
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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.
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The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
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I go on many thrilling adventures and wondrous, profound escapades through books.
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I'd rather have written Cheers than anything I've written.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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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The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I hope that my ideas attract a lively dialogue, even if my sentences are simple. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony, too. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Kurt Vonnegut
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About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.
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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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Life is no way to treat an animal.
Kurt Vonnegut