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Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
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
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Science Fiction Writer
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Indianapolis
Indiana
Kurt Vonnegut
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Literature
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Performs
More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.
Kurt Vonnegut
Live while you live, when you're dead you're dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
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
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
Kurt Vonnegut
It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace.
Kurt Vonnegut
Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.
Kurt Vonnegut
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).
Kurt Vonnegut
Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
Kurt Vonnegut
Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.
Kurt Vonnegut
Jokes have to be quite naked to be understood. They have to be quite simple.
Kurt Vonnegut
Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.
Kurt Vonnegut
Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.
Kurt Vonnegut
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
Kurt Vonnegut
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Kurt Vonnegut
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar.
Kurt Vonnegut
Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.
Kurt Vonnegut
I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.
Kurt Vonnegut
I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble.
Kurt Vonnegut
