Kurt Vonnegut

Life is a series of surprises, and I'm always surprised by how much I'm surprised.

I've always been a fan of the absurd.

I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist.

I'm not a fan of war, but I'm a fan of peace.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm 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.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

I like it that the dead don't talk. If they did, the past would be even more unbearable than it already is.

True love can be defined as the love of a good woman and a good cigar.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and the poor are among the most physically miserable on Earth.

And I say, 'If you're going to be a writer, for God's sake, write.'

The most important thing for you to do is to find a story that you want to tell and then tell it. It's the only way you'll ever get any peace.

Mankind has been making a mess of things for a long time. It's time we started cleaning it up.

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

And so it goes.

You can't fight for your life and sanity and then leave the battlefield and go home and live happily ever after.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.