Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut

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

Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.

I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don't matter anymore.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

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

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

Unannounced changes in life's itinerary are like dancing lessons from God.

Well here you are, there it is, THIS is what it's all about.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.

We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.

We are what we pretend to be.

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

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next

The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.

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

Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.