God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I...

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.

Almost every war ends, properly, with its veterans feeling deceived and pointless and gullible, with their being persuaded that all participants were equally vile.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too,...

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to...

He didn’t know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.

He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life...

My gosh,” I said, “another human being.””You’ll never know how human,” she said.”Maybe I will,” I said. “I could try.”I did try, and I do try, and I give you the toast of a happy...

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

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself — will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are...

Is this some kind of joke?””That’s for me to know and you to find out.””Maybe you think it’s funny to put up signs about people who want to commit suicide.””Are you about to?””And what if...

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….

Nous esperons que notre grand-père vivra encore longtemps.

There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.–“Bomar

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

I’m wild again, beguiled again, a wimpering, simpering child I am.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

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.

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something...

The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed...

I hear he liked flowers pretty well.””Yes,” said Annie, “he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him.”–“Out, Brief Candle

I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.

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

I thought the worst of everyone.