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I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.

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.
Fear
Frustration
Many
Weren
Would
Forth
Think
Jokes
Thinking
Response
Like
Constant
Crime
Trouble
Troubles

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.
Kurt Vonnegut
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People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do.
Kurt Vonnegut
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This is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.
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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Hardly anyone in the world is an American
Kurt Vonnegut
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The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
Kurt Vonnegut
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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
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The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.
Kurt Vonnegut