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Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

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.
Particular
Drag
Talk
Guts
Novelists
Society
Quick
Around
Shot
Like
Shots
Writers
Bears
Witted

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
Kurt Vonnegut
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During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You are better than you think.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There is a strong feeling in the Middle West that the artist is not pulling his own weight no matter how hard he may work, that the other people are doing the real stuff.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis.
Kurt Vonnegut
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To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
Kurt Vonnegut
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To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man. They don't make memories like that anymore
Kurt Vonnegut
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Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.
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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The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.
Kurt Vonnegut
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How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
Kurt Vonnegut