God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

I don’t think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about the secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. They’re talking about...

You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.

But doing that job, surviving it, was like getting a Purple Heart. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to...

On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy: “This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.””You can?” said Billy.On the ninth day the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were: “You...

There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody,...

Yes, and our sister’s sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere – not anywhere. The...

Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her...

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my...

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...

Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally and if they would contribute mutually to each others’ welfare.This world is not a vale...

It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space… [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so...

He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: “I had just been assigned to...

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

Find a subject you care about and which you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in...

This is a beguiling book,

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

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies heonly appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people tocry...

I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong...

A woman’s not a woman till the pills wear off.

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

The thing about money is,” said Ben, “you can’t be polite to it. Leave something suspicious to say, and it’ll say it…Leave something greedy to say, and it’ll say it…Leave something scary to say, and...

There were lots of things to stop and see – and then it was time to go, always time to go.

Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: “Just say no.

So the people of Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly for the Elders, so the Elders put...

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...

Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

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...

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky....

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the...

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

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...

What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn’t how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It’s the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to...

And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted...

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

Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.

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.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been...