Kurt Vonnegut

The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. “You were her audience,” she said. “Writers will kill for an audience.” “An audience of one?” I said. “That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs.

Writing

She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.

Life

What a coincidence! But that is all it is. One mustn’t take such things too seriously.

Life

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else to start anew.

America

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to He and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

America

“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”

Life

What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

Life

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” Can you imagine that?

War

She said to him that the whole world suddenly seemed to be going crazy. He commented that there was nothing sudden about it, that it had belonged in a prison or a lunatic asylum for quite some time.

Life

I held my hands in front of my eyes, and I said out loud and with all my heart: ‘Thank you, Meat.’” Oh, happy Meat. Oh, happy Soul. Oh, happy Rabo Karabekian.

Other

“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”

Writing

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

Life

As for Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici, according to Kim Bum Suk: he was a banker, which I choose to translate as “loan shark and extortionist” or “gangster,” in the parlance of the present day.

Wealth

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

Life

“As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’” “Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—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. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.”

People

Terry Kitchen said that the only moments he ever experienced as non-epiphanies, when God left him alone, were those following sex and the two times he took heroin.

Life

“I never prayed before, but I’ll pray tonight that you never go to Europe as a soldier. We should never get suckered again into providing meat for the cannons and machine guns they love so much. They could go to war at any time. Look how big their armies are in the midst of a Great Depression! “If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe,” he said, “and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again.

War

Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

Life

“The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”

War

“Early one morning she crossed a meadow, carrying two precious eggs to a neighbor who had given birth to a baby the night before. She stepped on a mine. We don’t know what army was responsible. We do know the sex. Only a male would design and bury a device that ingenious. Before you leave, maybe you can persuade Lucrezia to show you all the medals she won.” Can I please return to my hotel?” “No,” she said. “I think I’ve reduced you to the level of self-esteem which men try to force on women. If I have, I would very much like to have you stay for the tea I promised you. Who knows? We might even become friends again.”

War

What is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’”

Writing

"The Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups—after we’d done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.”

War

kar•a•bek•i•an (,kar-a-‘bek-ē-an), n. (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th cent, painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both.

Maybe

Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States.

America

One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Life

She replied that she wasn’t on Earth to be pleased but to be instructed. “I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals,” she said. “Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison.”

Life

“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

Life

“Leave it to Americans to write, ‘The End.’”

America

In 1928, the stock market never seemed to do anything but go up and up, just like the one we have today! Whoopee!

Wealth

“Does the picture have a title?” she said, rejoining me at the middle. “Yes it does,” I said. “What is it?” she said. And I said: “‘Now It’s the Women’s Turn.’”

Other

Bluebeard is a fictitious character in a very old children’s tale, possibly based loosely on a murderous nobleman of long ago. In the story, he has married many times. He marries for the umpteenth time, and brings his latest child bride back to his castle. He tells her that she can go into any room but one, whose door he shows her.

Other

The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.

Education

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

War

GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY.

Other

Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

People

There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.

Environment

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick.

America

Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.

America

They used human beings for machinery, and even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machinery.

Wealth

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy by and large.

Environment

People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.

People

To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

Other

The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

Wealth

Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.

Religion

1492: The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

America

We are all healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

People

Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

People

God made mud.

Religion

If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

Life

I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.

Religion

God got lonesome, so god said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!' See all I've made, said God, the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars. And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God! Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. I will go to heaven now. I can hardly wait... To find out for certain what my wampeter was... and who was in my karass... And all the good things our karass did for you. Amen.

Religion

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; man got to sit and wonder, "why, why why?" Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

People

Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks, For he knows a man's as big as what he hopes and thinks!

People

Science is magic that works.

Science

Busy, busy, busy.

Other

Nothing in this book is true. "Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."

Life

Be like a baby, the bible say, so I stay like a baby to this very day.

Life

Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.

Religion

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before, he is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

People

See the cat? See the cradle?

Other

“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. “There is evil for you. “We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. “I give you a holy word: DISARM.”

War

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Life

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

Life

“To be is to do”—Socrates. “To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre. “Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra.

Life

It may be a bad thing that so many people try to make good stories out of their lives. A story, after all, is as artificial as a mechanical bucking bronco in a drinking establishment.

Life

And she wasn’t going to go seeking any kind of Holy Grail, since that was clearly a man’s job, and she already had a cup that overflowed and overflowed with good things to eat and drink anyway. I suppose that’s really what so many American women are complaining about these days: They find their lives short on story and overburdened with epilogue. Mother’s story ended when she married the handsomest rich man in town.

Life

Eggs à la Rudy Waltz (age thirteen): Chop, cook, and drain two cups of spinach. Blend with two tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of nutmeg. Heat and put into three oven-proof bowls or cups. Put a poached egg on top of each one, and sprinkle with grated cheese. Bake for five minutes at 375 degrees.

Other

We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Life

I will explain the main symbols in this book. There is an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me. There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone. Haiti is New York City, where I live now. The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done.

Other

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—: " ’God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

Life

"I look at these people, these Americans," Eliot went on, "and I realize that they can’t even care about themselves any more—because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river—they’re almost completely automatic now. And America doesn’t even need these people for war—not any more.

Automation

He recalled what his favorite professor, Leonard Leech, once told him about getting ahead in law. Leech said that, just as a good airplane pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer be looking for situations where large amounts of money were about to change hands.

Wealth

"In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So—if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out."

Automation

The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time—to start thinking in terms of projects.

People

I do realize that I am a very slow realizer.

People

"Old men without hope have a tendency to be both crude and accurate.

People

You mean shame about not knowing where the Money River is?" "The what?" "The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it—and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts’ content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently." "Slurping lessons?" "From lawyers! From tax consultants! From customers’ men! We’re born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes’ screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping." "I wasn’t aware that I slurped." Eliot was fleetingly heartless, for he was thinking angrily in the abstract. "Born slurpers never are. And they can’t imagine what the poor people are talking about when they say they hear somebody slurping. They don’t even know what it means when somebody mentions the Money River. When one of us claims that there is no such thing as the Money River I think to myself, ’My gosh, but that’s a dishonest and tasteless thing to say.’ "

Wealth

"It’s still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own." "Sure—provided somebody tells him when he’s young enough that there is a Money River, that there’s nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. ’Go where the rich and the powerful are,’ I’d tell him, ’and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You’ll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.’ "

Wealth

"what you did in Rosewater County was far from insane. It was quite possibly the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use?

Automation

But there is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life in New York. And I roam. And I roam.

Life

Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word."

People

I still find it hard to realize that I am an alcoholic, though even strangers know this right away.

Alcohol

The worst flaw is that we’re just plain dumb.

People

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

Wealth

That much of his dream is actually coming true now. The National Forest is now being logged by Mexican laborers using Japanese tools, under the direction of Swedes. The proceeds are expected to pay half of day-before-yesterday’s interest on the National Debt.

Politics

The greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.

Life

The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck. As the tag line of my favorite dirty joke would have it: “Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here.”

Life

The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.

Education

The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

Alcohol

Can you imagine what 1,000,000,000 Chinese in automobiles would do to each other and what’s left of the atmosphere?

Environment

In Vietnam, though, I really was the mastermind. Yes, and that still bothers me. During my last year there, when my ammunition was language instead of bullets, I invented justifications for all the killing and dying we were doing which impressed even me! I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus!

War

The computer doesn’t ask if the person is real or not. It doesn’t care about anything. It especially doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings. You load it up with details about a life, real or imagined, and then it spits out a story about what was likely to happen to him or her. This story is based on what has happened to real persons with the same general specifications.

Technology

I argued that it was a teacher’s duty to speak frankly to students of college age about all sorts of concerns of humankind, not just the subject of a course as stated in the catalogue. “That’s how we gain their trust, and encourage them to speak up as well,” I said, “and realize that all subjects do not reside in neat little compartments, but are continuous and inseparable from the one big subject we have been put on Earth to study, which is life itself.”

Education

Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.

Alcohol

I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

Politics

The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy.

People

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

Life

“Life’s a bad dream,” he said. “Do you know that?”

Life

He was a sociopath, I think, in love with himself and no one else, craving action for its own sake, and indifferent to any long-term consequences, a classic Man of Destiny.

People

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

People

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

People

“They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops,” he said. “Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!”

Wealth

I regaled myself with a story by my prison friend Dr. Robert Fender, which he had published under the name of “Kilgore Trout.” It was called “Asleep at the Switch.” It was about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of heaven—filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth. You could not get into heaven until you had submitted to a full review of how well you had handled the business opportunities God, through His angels, had offered to you on Earth. All day long and in every cubicle you could hear the experts saying with utmost weariness to people who had missed this opportunity and then that one: “And there you were, asleep at the switch again.”

Religion

“Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

Religion

He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile.

Religion

YOUNG PEOPLE STILL REFUSE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS IMPOSSIBILITY OF WORLD DISARMAMENT AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY. COULD BE FAULT OF NEW TESTAMENT (QUOD VIDE). WALTER F. STARBUCK PRESIDENT’S SPECIAL ADVISOR ON YOUTH AFFAIRS

People

“I then believed that a rich man should have some understanding of the place from which his riches came. That was very juvenile of me. Great wealth should be accepted unquestioningly, or not at all.”

Wealth

Jesus, according to Saint Matthew, had promised to say in the Person of God to sinners on Judgment Day. This is it: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” These words appalled me then, and they appall me now. They are surely the inspiration for the notorious cruelty of Christians.

Religion

Pay attention, please, for years as well as people are characters in this book, which is the story of my life so far. Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine wrecked the American economy. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one sent me to Harvard. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-eight got me my first job in the federal government. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me a wife. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me an ungrateful son. Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-three fired me from the federal government.

Other

I was making my mind as blank as possible, you see, since the past was so embarrassing and the future so terrifying.

Life

Those were our salad days, when we were green in judgment.

Life

So it is no casual thing on Earth to say to a pubescent barnacle or to a homeless soul from Vicuna, ‘Sit thee doon, sit thee doon.’”

Life

"Life is divided up into phases," he said. "Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognize what is expected of you in each phase. That's the secret of successful living."

Life

Why don't you learn dat old Golden Rule?

Life

When you're dead you're dead.

Life

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

People

Does alcohol help? "I think it only seems to--and only seems to for about half an hour," I said. This, too was an opinion from my youth.

Alcohol

My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone.

People

A poem by William Blake called "The Question Answered": What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

Life

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toother thought machine, driven by a standard or even substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

America

Make love when you can. It's good for you.

Romance

This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of the wrong people.

America

And then the air-raid sirens blew again, and we realized that we were ordinary people, without dove or covenant, and that the flood, far from being over, had scarcely begun.

People

How many women eager to fuck me do you suppose I encountered in three long years? I could ask the same question about months and months in my civilian life, and get the same answer: to all practical purposes, none.

Romance

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water.

Writing

The German quotation means this, and I take it seriously: “Whatever it is that you have inherited from your father, you are going to have to earn it if it is to really belong to you.”

Wealth

I have heard other people say that they, too, remain irrationally fond of those who were with them when they were just starting out. It’s a common thing.

Life

My books so far have argued that most human behavior, no matter how ghastly or ludicrous or glorious or whatever, is innocent.

People

“Who in America is truly happy?” my offspring used to ask me in one way or another as they entered adolescence, which is children’s menopause.

Life

They are actually proud of their illiteracy. They imagine that they are somehow celebrating the bicentennial when they boast, as some did in Levittown, that they hadn’t actually read the books they banned. Such lunks are often the backbone of volunteer fire departments and the United States Infantry and cake sales and so on, and they have been thanked often enough for that. But they have no business supervising the educations of children in a free society. They are just too bloody stupid.

Education

The mortality rate in some wards was sensational—25 percent or more. Semmelweis reasoned that the mothers were being killed by medical students, who often came into the wards immediately after having dissected corpses riddled with disease. He was able to prove this by having the students wash their hands in soap and water before touching a woman in labor. The mortality rate dropped. The jealousy and ignorance of Semmelweis’s colleagues, however, caused him to be fired, and the mortality rate went up again. Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.

People

They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

Religion

It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall, as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected Germany, a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation, with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.

Life

I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk the night before, he would always answer off-handedly, “Oh, I imagine.” I’ve always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream.

Life

We were just getting our footing as adult citizens, and in other times we might have been correct in thinking that we had better like and trust each other a lot, since we would be together for life.

Life

I myself grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

America

They began to live on their capital which, to a good bourgeois, is a heresy looked upon with horror and usually followed by disaster.

Wealth

Psychoanalysts are missing important clues about patients’ childhoods if they do not ask about dogs the patients knew. As I have said elsewhere, dogs still seem as respectable and interesting as people to me. Any day.

Life

A child will compete with its father in an area where the father is weak, in an area where the father mistakenly believes himself to be quite accomplished.

Life

The trouble with so many of the moral codes we have inherited is that they are subject to so many interpretations. We require specialists, historians and archaeologists and linguists and so on, to tell us where this or that idea may have come from, to suggest what this or that statement might actually mean. This is good news for hypocrites, who enjoy feeling pious, no matter what they do.

Life

“As for boredom: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died seventy-eight years ago, had this to say: ‘Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.’ We are supposed to be bored. It is a part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women and men.

Life

“I have not said that our government is anti-nature and anti-God. I have said that it is non-nature and non-God, for very good reasons that could curl your hair. “Well—all good things must come to an end, they say. So American freedom will come to an end, too, sooner or later. How will it end? As all freedoms end: by the surrender of our destinies to the highest laws.

America

Did the study of anthropology later color your writings? VONNEGUT: It confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I’d always thought they were. We weren’t allowed to find one culture superior to any other. We caught hell if we mentioned races much. It was highly idealistic. INTERVIEWER: Almost a religion? VONNEGUT: Exactly. And the only one for me. So far. INTERVIEWER: What was your dissertation? VONNEGUT: Cat’s Cradle.

Religion

“What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

America

He goes on to say that it was Wilson who persuaded this country that it was patriotic to be stupid, to be proud of knowing only one language, of believing that all other cultures were inferior and ridiculous, offensive to God and common sense alike, that artists and teachers and studious persons in general were ninnies when it came to dealing with problems in life that really mattered, and on and on.

America

Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

Writing

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split. I admire anybody who finishes a work of art, no matter how awful it may be.

Art

I can only reply that the secret to success in every human endeavor is total concentration. To put it another way: Sometimes I don’t consider myself very good at life, so I hide in my profession.

Life

“existential hum,” the uneasiness which keeps us moving, which never allows us to feel entirely at ease.

Life

“We would have to understand from the first the scientific fact that any wound we inflict on the life-support systems of this planet is likely to be quite permanent. So anyone who wounded the planet, and then pretended to heal it, would simply be another hypocrite. He would remain quite permanently an evil and therefore disgusting human being.

Environment

But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate my subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Writing

Whenever ideas are squashed in this country, literate lovers of the American experiment write careful and intricate explanations of why all ideas must be allowed to live. It is time for them to realize that they are attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans.

America

He was also then a socialist, and among the books he gave me, when I was a high school sophomore, was Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. I understood it perfectly and loved it, since it made low comedy of the empty graces and aggressively useless possessions which my parents, and especially my mother, meant to regain someday.

Wealth

“Truth,” he says, “must always be recognized as the paramount requisite of human society.”

People

What isn’t congenial is an admission that I have been forced to be celibate for long periods of time. I search the index of The Joy of Sex in vain for “celibacy,” which happens to be the most common human sexual adventure, and which could be illustrated nicely by a page as white as a snowdrift.

Romance

The rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: “We’re sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for.” The truth.

Politics

We Americans were told by the Soviets that we should be embarrassed that their country published so much of our work, and that we published so little of theirs.

America

Those of you who have been kind enough to read a book of mine, any book of mine, will know of my admiration for large families, whether real or artificial, as the primary supporters of mental health.

People

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads—or in other people’s heads. “And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. “By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

Writing

Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles.

Writing

Here is the same rule paraphrased to apply to storytelling, to fiction: Never include a sentence which does not either remark on character or advance the action.

Writing

“How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful—and therefore echoes excitingly in the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing.

Religion

“More important, though: the acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

Religion

A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces. “So I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.

Life

We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained. I write.

Life

“How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. “The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer. You are so relieved to at last meet somebody who doesn’t demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.

Writing

Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on Earth -- hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to lock up people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws.

Automation

During the past three wars, the right of technology to increase in power and scope was unequestionably, in point of national survival, almost a divine right. Americans owe their lives to superior machines, techniques, organization, and managers and engineers. For these means of surviving the wars, the Ghost Shirt Society and I thank God. But we cannot win good lives for ourselves in peacetime by the same methods we used to win battles in wartime. The problems of peace are altogether more subtle.

War

"If these are not slaves, how you get them to do what they do?" "Patriotism," said the General of the Armies Bromley sternly. "Patriotism, damn it." "Love of country."

Automation

That, of course, simply applies to the First Industrial Revolution, where machines devalued muscle work. The second revolution, the one we're now completing, is a little tougher to express in terms of work saved. If there were some measure like horsepower in which we could express annoyance or boredom that people used to experience in routine jobs -- but there isn't.

Automation

"The time has come to stop the lawlessness in that part of our culture which is your special responsibility. Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacementis not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness. Without regard for the changes in human life patterns that may result, new machines, new forms of organization, new ways of increasing efficiency, are constantly being introduced. To do this without regard for the effects on life patterns is lawlessness.

Automation

Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts. In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live.

Automation

"In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them--the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect."

Automation

"This book is not a book about what is, but a book about what could be. The characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or perhaps, at this writing, infants. It is mostly about managers and engineers. At this point in history, 1952 A.D., out lives and freedom depend largely upon the skill and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free.

Automation

If we plot man hours worked against the number of tubes in use, the man hours worked drop as the tubes increase… And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately… And organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency, all parallel the growth of the use of vacuum tubes.

Automation

"It's about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get," said Finnerty. "How's somebody going to up his I.Q.?" "Exactly," said Lasher. "And it's built on more than just brain power-- it's built on special kinds of brain power. Not only must a person be bright, he must be bright in certain approved, useful directions: basically, management or engineering."

Automation

The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way that machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

Automation

"It's strength and faith and determination. Our job is to open new doors at the head of the procession of civilization. That's what the engineer, the manager does. There is no higher calling."

Automation

"Not slaves," said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. "Citizens, employed by government. They have the same rights as other citizens -- free speech, freedom of worship, the right to vote. Before the war, they worked in the Ilium Works, controlling machines, but now machines control themselves much better."

Automation

Actually, it's kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn't it? It was so rediculous to have people stuck in one place all day, just using their senses, then a reflex, using their senses, then a reflex, and not really thinking at all.

Automation

It's just a hell of a time to be alive, is all -- just this goddamn messy business of people having to get used to new ideas. And people just don't that's all. I wish this were a hundred years from now, with everybody used to the change.

Automation

EPICAC XIV, though undedicated, was already at work, deciding how many refrigerators, how many lamps, how many turbine-generators, how many hub caps, how many dinner plates, how many door knobs, how many rubber heels, how many television sets, how many pinochle decks--how many everything America and her customers could have and how much they would cost. And it was EPICAC XIV who would decide for the coming years how many engineers and managers and research men and civil servants, and of what skills, would be needed in order to deliver the goods; and what I.Q. and aptitude levels would separate the useful men from the useless ones, and how many Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps men and how many soldiers could be supported at what pay level and where..."

Automation

"The government does not own the machines. They simply tax that part of industry's income that once went into labor, and redistribute it."

Automation

I propose that men and women be returned to work as controllers of machines, and that the control of people by machines be curtailed. I propose, further, that the effects of changes in technology and organization on life patterns be taken into careful consideration, and that the changes be withheld or introduced on the basis of this consideration.

Automation

The sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it's the people's to take back, if they so wish. The machines, have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Automation

The first industrial revolution devalued muscle work, then the second industrial revolution devalued mental work.

Automation

One horsepower equals twenty-two manpower, big manpower. If you convert the horse-power of one of the bigger steel mill motors into terms of manpower, you'll find that the motor does more work than the entire slave population of the United States at the time of the Civil War could do-- and do it twenty four hours a day.

Automation

Seems like these days the engineers and managers and the like are everything, and the average man is nothing anymore

Automation

You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man's being a creation of God. But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress--namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.

Automation

That's just it: things haven't always been that way. It's new, and it's people like us who've brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it's quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something.

Automation

You , the engineers and managers and bureaucrats, almost alone among men of higher intelligence, have continued to believe that the condition of man improves in direct ratio to the energy and devices for using energy put at his disposal. You believed this through the three most horrible wars in history, a monumental demonstration of faith.

Automation

When Paul thought about his effortless rise in the hierarchy, he sometimes, as now, felt sheepish, like a charlatan. He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn't have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality.

Automation

Rudy hadn't understood quite what the recording instruments were all about, but what he had understood, he'd like: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape.

Automation

The play's message had been the same: that the common man wasn't nearly as grateful as he should be for what the engineers and managers had given him, and that the radicals were the cause of the ingradtitude.

Automation

"The way they keep culture so cheap is by knowing in advance what and how much of it people want. They get it right, right down to the color of the jacket."

Automation

Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

Automation

He looked up to see the profound satisfaction, the uplift of creativity, in the faces of the Reeks and Wrecks.

Automation

No cabs had bothered to meet the unpromising train. Paul phoned the cab company, but no one answered. He looked helplessly at the automatic ticket vendor, the automatic nylon vendor, the automatic coffee vendor, the automatic gum vendor, the automatic book vendor, the automatic newspaper vendor, the automatic toothbrush vendor, the automatic Coke vendor, the automatic shoeshine machine, the automatic photo studio, and walked into the deserted streets on the Homestead side of the river.

Automation

"Jimmy, I.Q. isn't everything. Some of the unhappiest people in this world are the smartest ones."

Automation

Their superiority is what gets me, this damn hierarchy that measures men against machines. It's a pretty unimpressive kind of man that comes out on top.

Automation

Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore be returned to participation in such enterprises.

Automation

"Well--there's some pretty stiff rules about that. You can't play college football, and go to school. They tried that once, and you know what a silly mess that was."

College

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

Automation

A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one's been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess--machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.

Automation

"But the test says no," said Bud. "So the machines say no," said Katharine. "So that's that"

Automation

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

Romance

It is lucky, too for human beings need all the relatives they can get--as possible donors or recievers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

Life

They were fabulously well-to-do, and descended from Americans who had all but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot's Delight--obsessively turning money into power, and then power back into money again, and then money back into power again.

Wealth

It is a thing I often say these days: "Hi ho." It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long. Hi ho.

Other

Lonesome no more!

Other

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, annyway, although the ones I have like best couldd easily be described as "common decency."

Romance

Life can be painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly.

Life

It is about what life feels like to me.

Life

They were innocent great apes, with limited means for doing mischief, which, in my opinion as an old, old man, is all that human beings were ever meant to be.

People

The People's Republic of China was at that very moment secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses--by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds. And those patchwork minds were the equals of Sir Isaac Newton's or William Sharespeare's, say.

America

We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangable parts in the American machine.

America

I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America, too. We argued that it was a good scheme for a misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves--and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.

America

--Das Ende--

Other

I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love. It does not seem important to me. What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.

Life

Mother said that it seemed like such a long time since Americans had discovered anything. "All of a sudden," she said, "everything is being discovered by the Chinese."

America

They might roam the wide world over when they were young, and often have wonderful adventures. But they were all told sooner or later that it was time for them to come home to Indianapolis, and to settle down. They invariably obeyed--because they had so many relatives there.

Vonnegut

So it goes.

Life

They do not reach maturity, then deteriorate and die. They reach maturity and stay in full bloom, so to speak, for as long as Mercury cares to sing. There is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another. Hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion, and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown. The creatures have only one sense: touch. They have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first. The first is, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.” The second is, “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

Life

“Look,” said Rumfoord, “life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster.” He turned to shiver his hands in her face. “All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure,” he said, “I can see the whole roller coaster you’re on. And sure—I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn’t help you any.” “I don’t see why not,” said Beatrice. “Because you’d still have to take the roller-coaster ride,” said

Life

I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm.

Life

Theology: (15.) Somebody made everything for some reason.

Religion

He carried forty-eight pounds—carried them gladly. A stronger person would have carried more, a weaker person would have carried less. Every strong member of Redwine’s faith accepted handicaps gladly, wore them proudly everywhere. The weakest and meekest were bound to admit, at last, that the race of life was fair.

Life

“The name of the new religion,” said Rumfoord, “is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. “The flag of that church will be blue and gold,” said Rumfoord. “These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself. “The two chief teachings of this religion are these,” said Rumfoord: “Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

Religion

Like the college professor he was, Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable new ones.

Education

“Don’t ask me why, old sport,” said Stony, “but somebody up there likes you.”

Life

Everything Rumfoord did he did with style, making all mankind look good. Everything Constant did he did in style—aggressively, loudly, childishly, wastefully—making himself and mankind look bad.

Other

The creatures cling to the singing walls of their caves. In that way, they eat the song of Mercury.

Other

They had obviously discovered the consolations of alcohol and cynicism late in life. They never ordered the same drink twice, were avid to know what was in this bottle and what was in that one—to know what a golden dawn punch was, and a Helen Twelvetrees, and a pluie d’or, and a merry widow fizz. The bartender knew they weren’t alcoholics. He was familiar with the type, and loved the type: they were simply two Saturday Evening Post characters at the end of the road.

Alcohol

The reason both Daddies can be right and still get into terrible fights is because there are so many different ways of being right. There are places in the Universe, though, where each Daddy could finally catch on to what the other Daddy was talking about. These places are where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy’s solar watch. We call these places chrono-synclastic infundibula.

Other

The office was spookily furnished, since none of the furniture had legs. Everything was suspended magnetically at the proper height. The tables and the desk and the bar and the couches were floating slabs. The chairs were tilted, floating bowls. And most eerie of all, pencils and pads were scattered at random through the air, ready to be snatched by anyone who had an idea worth writing down. The carpet was as green as grass for the simple reason that it was grass—living grass as lush as any putting green. Malachi Constant

Other

As he says in his Pocket History of Mars: “Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.

Religion

“Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them!

Politics

“Hell,” she said, “I had an unhappier childhood than you did. My mother was a whore and my father never came home, either—but we were poor besides. At least you had billions of dollars.”

Wealth

He meant I was shrewd and thorough, but I wasn’t remarkably lucky. I had to find somebody who had luck in an astonishing degree—and so I have.”

Other

Constant existed as a point—could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way.

Other

“I was a victim of a series of accidents,” he said. He shrugged. “As are we all,” he said.

Life

The official estimate of the number of thermo-nuclear anti-aircraft rockets fired at the Martian armada is 2,542,670. The actual number of rockets fired is of little interest when one can express the power of that barrage in another way, in a way that happens to be both poetry and truth. The barrage turned the skies of Earth from heavenly blue to a hellish burnt orange. The skies remained burnt orange for a year and a half.

War

Now Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena—apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse. The earth was about to intercept that spiral.

Other

“It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

Life

Fern thereupon proved this to Noel Constant, father of Malachi—and Fern showed him an organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

Wealth

CHRONO-SYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULA—

Other

Winston Niles Rumfoord was a member of the one true American class. The class was a true one because its limits had been clearly defined for at least two centuries—clearly defined for anyone with an eye for definitions. From Rumfoord’s small class had come a tenth of America’s presidents, a quarter of its explorers, a third of its Eastern Seaboard governors, a half of its full-time ornithologists, three-quarters of its great yachtsmen, and virtually all of its underwriters of the deficits of grand opera. It was a class singularly free of quacks, with the notable exception of political quacks. The political quackery was a means of gaining office—and was never carried into private life. Once in office, members of the class became, almost without exception, magnificently responsible.

Wealth

“My father gave me only two pieces of advice,” he said, “and only one of them has stood the test of time. They were: ‘Don’t touch your principal,’ and ‘Keep the liquor bottle out of the bedroom.’” His embarrassment and confusion were now too great to be borne. “Good-by,” he said abruptly. “Good-by?” said young Malachi, startled. He moved toward the door. “Keep the liquor bottle out of the bedroom,” said the old man, and he turned his back.

Life

The reason I told Ransom K. Fern to give you this letter only if your luck turned bad is that nobody thinks or notices anything as long as his luck is good. Why should he? So have a look around for me, boy. And if you go broke and somebody comes along with a crazy proposition my advice is to take it. You might just learn something when you’re in a mood to learn something. The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren’t and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

Life

I WAS A VICTIM OF A SERIES OF ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL.

Life

If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, Skip, there’s no sense in trying to explain it to you.

Other

The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood.” That is in an essay on the sudden death of his daughter

Life

To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, “indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex.”

Writing

Sodium said enough was enough, that any further testimony would be coals to Newcastle. It made a motion that all chemicals involved in medical research combine whenever possible to create ever more powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to evolve new strains that were resistant to them.

Other

“He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. “Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”

Life

“Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.” “What was it?” I said. “Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.” Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening. All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it soul.” He paused. “Ting-a-ling?” he said.

Life

I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in. Let that be my epitaph.

Vonnegut

In my novel Cat’s Cradle, I say that anybody whose life keeps tangling up with yours for no logical reason is likely a member of your karass, a team God has formed to get something done for Him.

Other

I asked the late great German novelist Heinrich Böll what the basic flaw was in the German character. He said, “Obedience.”

People

I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation, but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.

Science

“Of native talent itself I say in speeches: ‘If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.’”

Life

Understand: I could go to college only if I took the same sorts of courses my brother had. Father and Bernie were agreed on that. Any other sort of higher education was what they both called ornamental. They laughed at Uncle Alex the insurance salesman because his education at Harvard had been so ornamental.

Education

Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”

Life

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”

Life

He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.

Life

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’”

Other

Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place. Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: “What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?”

Writing

I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.

Romance

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done before.

Writing

I don’t have a copy of my letter as prose. As a poem, though, this is its appearance: And no thanks to Fate. When we’re gone, there won’t be anybody Sufficiently excited by ink on paper To realize how good it is. I have this ailment not unlike Ambulatory pneumonia, which might be called Ambulatory writer’s block. I cover paper with words every day, But the stories never go anywhere I find worth going. Slaughterhouse-Five has been turned Into an opera by a young German, And will have its premiere in Munich this June. I’m not going there either. Not interested. I am fond of Occam’s Razor, Or the Law of Parsimony, which suggests That the simplest explanation of a phenomenon Is usually the most trustworthy. And I now believe, with David’s help, That writer’s block is finding out How lives of loved ones really ended Instead of the way we hoped they would end With the help of our body English. Fiction is body English. Whatever.

Writing

Hooray for firemen! Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies. Hooray for firemen.

People

“Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper,” he went on. “Wonderful! As though the planet weren’t already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!”

Environment

And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary mortal, seemingly, uttered, with no more to go by, as far as we know, than signals from his dog’s breakfast, from his three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge.

Science

I think now, with the clambake at Xanadu only five years away, about a man I might have been, spending his adult life among those he went to high school with, loving and hating, as had his parents and grandparents, a town that was his own.

Life

“It was all here for me, just as it has all been for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models. “People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.”

People

She may have felt like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was.

Writing

“That the rerun lasted ten years, short a mere four days, some are saying now, is proof that there is a God, and that He is on the Decimal System. He has ten fingers and ten toes, just as we do, they say, and uses them when He does arithmetic.

Other

Hitler still hasn’t lost his sense of humor. He says, “How about ‘BINGO’?”

Other

He quoted Shakespeare: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

Life

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

Writing

I think Mother was raised to be so useless because her father Albert Lieber, the brewer and speculator, believed that America was going to have an aristocracy based on the European model. Proofs of membership in such a caste over there, and so it would be over here, too, he must have reasoned, were wives and daughters who were ornamental.

Wealth

When a little Boobooling was reading a book, a grownup might interrupt to say, depending on what was happening in the book, “Isn’t that sad? The little girl’s nice little dog has just been run over by a garbage truck. Doesn’t that make you want to cry?” Or the grownup might say, about a very different sort of story, “Isn’t that funny? When that conceited old rich man stepped on a nim-nim peel and fell into an open manhole, didn’t that make you practically pop a gut laughing?” A nim-nim was a banana-like fruit on Booboo.

Education

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

Writing

I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else may be going on.

Writing

I still quote Eugene Debs (1855–1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for President, in every speech: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Politics

“You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”

Life

T. S. Eliot, who wound up sounding like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Tennessee Williams, a product of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of

Other

The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess. Kilgore Trout was hooked on making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.

Writing

To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.

Life

Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.

People

“How the hell did I do that?”

Other

At the time of their invention, books were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

Writing

Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

Religion

Again: Somebody should look into this.

Life

“All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases,” he concluded. “And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day.”

Religion

I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

Life

We expected the USSR to try to become more like the USA, with freedom of speech and religion, and fair trials and honestly elected officials, and so on. We, in turn, would try to do what they claimed to be doing, which was to distribute goods and services and opportunities more fairly: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That sort of thing. Occam’s Razor.

America

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism.

Religion

appoggiatura

Other

I am Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, whose headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity.

Other