Quote

My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. 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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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.
Books
Hoping
Literature
Ruins
Hope
Fish
War
Mostly
Book
Fishes
Country
Add
Poisoned
Great
Wrote
Despised
World
Build
Served

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3. Keep it simple. 4. Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6. Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
As a matter of social class Ku Klux Klan would have been regarded as white trash.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
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
Image
Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
. . . hummings and clickings could be heard-the sounds attendant to the flow of electrons, now augmenting one maze of electromagnetic crises to a condition that was translatable from electrical qualities and quantities to a high grade of truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Jack Benny, Fred Allen. Their jokes were wonderful. It takes skill to be funny. The timing of Jack Benny was so fine. It is a form of genius for which we should be grateful.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward - and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
There are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.
Kurt Vonnegut