Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe.

There’s only one me, and I’m stuck with him.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.

Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!Say what you will about the sweet miracle...

and I’m whistling as beautifully as I can.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Be patient, Ophelia.Love,Hamlet

What is the secret of life?’ I asked.‘I forget,’ said Sandra.‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found something out about protein.‘‘Yeah,’ said Sandra, ‘that’s it.

How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. ‘Drugs were food,’ he said. ‘I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they’re hungry for, that makes them feel better after...

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.

He had a W.C. Fields twang and a nose like a prize strawberry.

My God, what have they done to you? This isn’t a man, it’s a broken kite.

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more...

Artists,” he said, “are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!

I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not anymore. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter.

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

in nonsense is strength

Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God

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.

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine...

This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second,...

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale.”George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus,...

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without a culture anymore.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

Human beings used to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all –as they pleased. My mother could do the waltz, the tango, the rumba….

He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done

I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.

Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

Money began talking to Ben again–not big money this time, but little money. It niggled and nagged and carped and whined at him, as full of fears and bitterness as a spinster witch.–“Money Talks

People who sell bolts and nuts and locomotives and frozen orange juice make billions, while the people who struggle to bring a little beauty into the world, give life a little meaning, they starve.–“$10,000 A Year, Easy

Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.

There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message– describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when...

How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)

…we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.

You’re the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, ‘I love you.’ And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don’t want my square of toilet paper.’I didn’t realize it was toilet paper.

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.