Quote

How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.

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.
Think
Hours
Terribly
Thinking
Reading
Period
People
Care
Periods
Book
Anybody
Take
Couple
Important
Worth
Something
Somebody
Make
Books
Contented

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
Son--they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
. . . 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
Image
Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I would not be interested in writing if I didn't feel that what I wrote was an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Start [writing] as close to the end as possible.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Roses are red, And ready for plucking, You're sixteen, And ready for high school.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
Oh, a lion hunter in the jungle dark, And a sleeping drunkard up in central park, and a Chinese dentist and a British queen All fit together in the same machine. Nice, nice, such very different people in the same device!
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
Kurt Vonnegut
Image
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