People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I concluded that the best thing for me and for those around me was to want nothing, to be enthusiastic about nothing, to be as unmotivated as possible, in fact, so that I would never again hurt anyone.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

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.

It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.

I don’t want to be a machine, and I don’t want to think about war,” EPICAC had written after Pat’s and my lighthearted departure. “I want to be made out of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve....

What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

The doctors agreed: He was going crazy…they didn’t think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of...

Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.

I want to congratulate librarians,…who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or...

To be is to do – SocratesTo do is to be – SartreDo Be Do Be Do – Sinatra

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.

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.”[From the preface.]

It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting—other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards.

Pretty, was she?””Pretty?” he echoed. “Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings and not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.

Q: What is wrong with the world?A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.

Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped. […] He closed his eyes, and opened them again. He was...

Tiek uzskatīts, ka pēc apkaušanas jāvalda kapa klusumam, un valda jau arī, tikai putni klaigā.

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

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.

Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with child-like seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before. I stole closer to her, and then I said, “Boo!”She jerked her head away from the eyepiece.”Hello,” I said.”You scared me to death,” she...

He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o’clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on...

Well finish your story anyway.”Where was I?”The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.”Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.And Father started giggling,” Castle...

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead...

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody.They may be teaching that still.Another thing they taught was that no one...

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with....

If people think nature is their friend then they sure don’t need an enemy.

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

You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do.

The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one.

The unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that...

Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.

A Man Without a Country

We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don’t even have to as a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

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?

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

Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

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.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,” the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on.

To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.

Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said.”So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors!