HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KURT VONNEGUT

Mr. Vonnegut is 83 today!

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we
pretend to be.
--Mother Night (1961)

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder why, why, why?

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand
--Cat's Cradle (1963)

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than
anything else I can think of. --Introduction to Our Time Is Now: Notes From the High School Underground (1970)

You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "My God, my God -" I said to myself, "it's the Children's Crusade."
--Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

[When] I was a student at the University of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go into any sort of art.

He said, "You know what artists are?"

I didn't.

"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!'"

--Timequake (1997)

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on.
Actually, practically nothing is going on.
--"When I Was Twenty-One" in Wampeters, Foma and Granfaloons (1974)


1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3. Keep it simple. 4. Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6. Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers.
--quoted in Science Fictionisms (1995) compiled by William Rotsler

We are human only to the extent that our ideas remain humane.
--Breakfast of Champions (1973)

And so on.
--Breakfast of Champions (1973)

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
--"Cold Turkey"

So it goes.
--Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

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