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I learned how to make jokes because I wanted to give people as much fun as they did, and I guess I did, too.
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.
Give
Wanted
Giving
Much
Make
Jokes
People
Guess
Fun
Learned
More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.
Kurt Vonnegut
That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.
Kurt Vonnegut
People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.
Kurt Vonnegut
High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Kurt Vonnegut
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
Kurt Vonnegut
Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.
Kurt Vonnegut
There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.
Kurt Vonnegut
The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.
Kurt Vonnegut
The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.
Kurt Vonnegut
Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!
Kurt Vonnegut
Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.
Kurt Vonnegut
The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.
Kurt Vonnegut
It's incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it - and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition.
Kurt Vonnegut
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.
Kurt Vonnegut
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
Kurt Vonnegut
One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
Kurt Vonnegut
People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.
Kurt Vonnegut
The big show is inside my head.
Kurt Vonnegut
After that demonstration everybody was thinking, what's going to happen to these wonderful men who have been so useful to us? We have to give people something to do with life.
Kurt Vonnegut
I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.
Kurt Vonnegut
