There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed. Kurt Vonnegut More Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut More Quotes From Kurt Vonnegut Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. Kurt Vonnegut radio stories writing Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. Kurt Vonnegut slaughterhouse-five believe facts I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War. Kurt Vonnegut philosophical dog war They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Kurt Vonnegut slaughterhouse-5 slaughterhouse-five love-one-another Life is no way to treat an animal. Kurt Vonnegut life-is animal way World War II made war reputable because it was a just war. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. You know how many other just wars there have been? Not many. And the guys I served with became my brothers. If it weren't for World War II, I'd now be the garden editor of The Indianapolis Star. I wouldn't have moved away. Kurt Vonnegut stars brother war The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically. Kurt Vonnegut wall blow jobs Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all. Kurt Vonnegut nice mother school Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of. Kurt Vonnegut writing sweet character When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut humor writing men Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. Kurt Vonnegut hocus-pocus imperfection character A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. Kurt Vonnegut eight eye book We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should. Kurt Vonnegut environmental animal thinking Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Kurt Vonnegut tattoo hurt beautiful Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. Kurt Vonnegut atheist motivational inspirational One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us. Kurt Vonnegut modern memorable television Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets. Kurt Vonnegut plato liars way If somebody says, "I love you," to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? "I love you, too." Kurt Vonnegut pistols love life Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. Kurt Vonnegut collars solar-system celluloid Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress. Kurt Vonnegut progress space science
