(1922–2007)
U.S. novelist
Kurt Vonnegut
Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are two things people at the top can’t stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.
Hocus Pocus (New York: Putnam, 1997), 201–2
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 132.
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 14.
One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 195.
My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 163.
Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
Timequake (NY: Penguin Book, 1997), 221.
The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 122.
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 17.
As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 1.
Do you realize that all great literature—Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”—are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?)
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 8-9.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dial Press, 2005) 49.
Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
Timequake (New York: Berkley Books, 1998), 219.