Kurt Vonnegut

“I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.”

“About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.”

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”

“I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.”

“Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.”

“I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.”

“Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.”

“Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.”

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.”

“If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.”

“If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.”

“That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.”

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”

“I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.”

“I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.”

“There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.”

“I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.”

“I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.”