Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

That’s nice to know.

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”

he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad.

To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff.

Trout was hooked on making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.

“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

And no thanks to Fate. When we’re gone, there won’t be anybody Sufficiently excited by ink on paper To realize how good it is. I have this ailment not unlike Ambulatory pneumonia, which might be called Ambulatory writer’s block. I cover paper with words every day, But the stories never go anywhere I find worth going.

And I now believe, with David’s help, That writer’s block is finding out How lives of loved ones really ended Instead of the way we hoped they would end With the help of our body English. Fiction is body English.

I asked the late great German novelist Heinrich Boll what the basic flaw was in the German character. He said, “Obedience.”

“If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Trout wrote of Eva Braun, “Her only crime was to have allowed a monster to ejaculate in her birth canal. These things happen to the best of women.”

Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife.

“I could have written a best-seller, if I’d had the patience to create three-dimensional characters. The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.”

I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.

“Just because you’re talented, that doesn’t mean you have to do something with it.”

I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.

“The main thing about van Gogh and me,” said Trout, “is that he painted pictures that astonished him with their importance, even though nobody else thought they were worth a damn, and I write stories that astonish me, even though nobody else thinks they’re worth a damn.

“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”

she had become infected with progeny.

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in. Let that be my epitaph.

No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.

“Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun.”

“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!’ ”

I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.

No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

“America,” wrote Kilgore Trout in MTYOAP, “is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday.

Do unto others’ vehicles as you would have them do unto yours.

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

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 people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”

I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth’s performance in Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage, breaking his leg, was “the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material.”

I asked him for a definition of a Gothic novel. He said, “A young woman goes into an old house and gets her pants scared off.”