"May I ask you a highly personal question?""It's what life does all the time."

"Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one."

"It's embarrassing to be human."

"Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is."

"I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies."

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."

"We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine."

"That's what is was to be young - to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do."

"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."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from the things she found in gift shops."

"She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind."

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

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything."

"If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington D.C."

"A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap."

"Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes."

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

"By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle."

"The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did."

"Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

"What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow."

"...a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit."

"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."

"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 was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know " you never wrote a story with a villain in it.'I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war."

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

"Fear hadn't come to him yet. Pain hadn't come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last-the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring."

"I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases."

"The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest."

"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 of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false."

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC."

"What is my definition of jazz? 'Safe sex of the highest order."

"Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows."

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

"The mind reels."

"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."

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters."

"Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug."

"Anyway-because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next-and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis-at any time of night or day."

"He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government."

"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."

"She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon]."

"The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake."

"Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow."

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

"Flashlight beams danced crazily."

"A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo."

"Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen."

"Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow."

"Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore."

"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?"