When I'm being funny, I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done has been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.
— Kurt Vonnegut
One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
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.
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.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
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.
To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. 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 do not care about them. You are not alone.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.
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.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
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.
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
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.
