Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is just dead machinery.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lemuria, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the Dejesus out of me.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As children, we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As for children's working off aggressions, I'm against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did not go boiling and bubbling through childhood with a lashed-down safety valve.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. If no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As for national greatness: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death. The Diagrams had never fought before. They fought well this time. They will never fight again. Furthermore, they will never play Finlandia on an ancient marimba again. Peace.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As I spoke of another's love and looked into the wide, blue windows of her soul, a rich, insistent yearning flooded my senses.--"Tango

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.