Kurt Vonnegut

A step backwards after making a wrong turn is a step in the right direction.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “The function of the artist is to make people like life better than before.”

Asked whether he’d ever seen this done, he said, “Yes, the Beatles did it.”

(From Dan Wakefield’s introduction to Vonnegut’s If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?, 2013.)

Another flaw in human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

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