Timequake

“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”

“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, "The Beatles did."”

“If this isn't nice, what is?”

“There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”

“It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now.”

“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.”

“You want to know why I don’t have AIDS, why I'm not HIV-positive like so many other people? I don’t fuck around. It’s as simple as that.”

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

“Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper. … As though the planet weren’t already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters.”

“Western Civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.”

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

“I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife.”

“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.”

“There is a planet in the solar system, where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn't figure that out until five hundred years ago!”

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

“In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.”

“All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.”

“I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

“Artists [...] 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 am eternally grateful [...] for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.”

“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.”

“Kilgore's Creed: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."”

“The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to be. They munch. They ruminate. If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it.”

“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."”

“Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.”

“Xanthippe thought her husband, Socrates, was a fool. Aunt Raye thought Uncle Alex was a fool. Mother thought Father was a fool. My wife thinks I am a fool. Wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.”

“Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.”