Deadeye Dick

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

It was all so impractical—which I guess was the whole idea.

I may have been trying to evolve into a superman, and then gave it up in the face of community disapproval.

It would have been nice to take a bath, and to go to bed between clean sheets, and to sleep until I died.

I have this trick for dealing with all my worst memories. I insist that they are plays. The characters are actors. Their speeches and movements are stylized, arch. I am in the presence of art.

She wasn’t wicked. She simply wasn’t useful.

Haiti as a nation was born out of the only successful slave revolt in all of human history. Imagine that. In no other instance have slaves overwhelmed their masters, begun to govern themselves and to deal on their own with other nations, and repelled foreigners who felt that natural law required them to be slaves again.

“You must find what I should have had the courage to look for,” she said, “what we should all have the courage to look for.” “What is that?” I said. Her answer was this: “Your own Katmandu.”

These were my people—as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.

What’s an idiot savant?

I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.

For some reason, the less you pay for a watch, the surer you can be that it will never stop.

“Your father was a fake. He couldn’t paint good pictures. I’m a fake. I can’t really play the piano. You’re a fake. You can’t write decent plays. It’s perfectly all right, as long as we all stay home. That’s where your brother made his mistake. He went away from home. They catch fakes out in the real world, you know. They catch ’em all the time.”

“To be is to do”—Socrates. “To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre. “Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra.