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The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

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.
Thing
Luck
People
Aren
Lucky
Learned
Business
School
Graduate
Ever
Harvard
Even
Graduates

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
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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.
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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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You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind.
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Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
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My ancestors came over from Germany about the time of the Civil War and one of them lost a leg and went back to Germany.
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It's perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It's perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments.
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Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what.
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A man without a home can't be lost.
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If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
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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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You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.
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The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.
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Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.
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If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.
Kurt Vonnegut
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All these years, I've been opening the window and making love to the world.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
Kurt Vonnegut