Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.

What is my definition of jazz? 'Safe sex of the highest order.

But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.

The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest.

This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.

The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

When I write, I feel like an armless leg less man with a crayon in his mouth.

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

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

You can__ write novels without a touch of paranoia. I__ paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

The mind reels.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

The museums in children__ minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror__o protect the children from eternal grief.For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died__o let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache.

I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.