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I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

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.
Literature
War
Served
Book
Hoping
Country
Add
World
Wrote
Build
Books

More quotes by 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.
Kurt Vonnegut
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It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.
Kurt Vonnegut
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egregious. most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. it has a much more interesting story than that to tell. it means outside the herd. imagine that - thousands of people, outside the herd.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.
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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People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We're behaving abominably. It's like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, I think Uncle Charlie's off his rocker. We are behaving in a bizarre manner.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too.
Kurt Vonnegut
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They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.
Kurt Vonnegut
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That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.
Kurt Vonnegut
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And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Unhappy failures need not apply.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.
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?
Kurt Vonnegut
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I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Kurt Vonnegut
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When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.
Kurt Vonnegut