Breakfast of Champions

What is the purpose of life?

To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.

Kurt Vonnegut

a man without a country (2)

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance tot he radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

Kurt Vonnegut
a man without a country (2005, p. 24)

Some random Vonnegut quotes

* Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists.
* True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was a good man, a kind man, a mensch. Our world is a shallower, drearier place without him. But anyone who has enjoyed any of his work, or been lucky enough to bask in his twinkle, can still rejoice, because we will always have him, in all his idiosyncratic twisted-chess perversity. The world is less without him, but it will always be more because of him.

Andrew Leonard (Salon.com)

Just a list of favourite SF books

Some of my favourite Philip K. Dick books:
* The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

It's a very amazing work in that you'll never know which character is which, and that even in the same sentence one person can become another.

* Dr. Bloodmoney
You'll never forget Hoppy, the phocomelus, Walt, orbiting the earth, Bonny, a strong woman, and Edie, her strange daughter. Some of Dick's best characters are in this book.
* Ubik
When you're dead, you're near death, and people can still visit you.

Some other favourites:
* The Sirens of Titan (Kurt Vonnegut)
* The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)
* Grass (Sheri S. Tepper)
* The Many-Coloured Land (Julian May)

Vonnegut quotes about art and science

* If I hadn't learned to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times.
* Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, threedimensional characters with ink on paper, he went on, Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!
* Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

The wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut

Like Philip K. Dick Vonnegut, being a prisoner of war, has something with the Second World War. Like Dick, he isn't afraid to use german in his novels. You'll notice that when you read his first masterpiece Slaughterhouse 5. In this novel Vonnegut tells a warstory mixed with the abduction of the lead character to Tralfamador, a fantasy he uses in many of his books. Just imagine being locked up in a zoo like we do to animals, and a whole bunch of curious Tralfamadorians looking at everything you do. Not always bad if you're imprisoned with a beautiful female... We also meet Kilgore Trout, the alter ego of Vonnegut, also seen in many of his novels. In Slaughterhouse 5 Vonnegut poses a theory about time that's very interesting, because according to his theory we can die in time, but because time is relative according to Tralfamadorians, we never really die. Slaughterhouse 5, as good as it is, is probably not the best Vonnegut novel, although it did introduce a new genre to the world, a genre that can only be described as pure Vonnegut.
The first Vonnegut novel I read was The Sirens of Titan, and I consider that novel - in my humble opinion - the best ever! Like Douglas Adams, Vonnegut explores the ever pressing question of the human condition: "What's the meaning of life?" Unlike Douglas Adams, we'll get an answer. And it fits. But there is more. Vonnegut critisises many aspects of our human society, one of them being science and how we as human beings interpret our observations of life. There's also a war going on, very similar to the Second World War, but in another time frame. It is, after all, an SF novel. This book is really a page turner, it being wittier than any Philip K. Dick novel (and knowing Philip K. Dick is my favourite writer, this means something).
I haven't read all Vonnegut novels yet, but among the above I really enjoyed the following. Timequake you probably noticed already has a lot of wisdom in it, and most of my quotes I post are out of this novel. The strange thing about Timequake is that it's the second version of a Kilgore Trout novel, where the original was never written in the new present, but it was in the old present. Again, time is one of the main characters in the books. Also fun in this novel is Vonnegut's alternative version of the "Adam and Eve" story, among others. Bluebeard is also one of my favourites. It's not SF, but it goes deep into human relationships. It's about an old forgotten artist who has hidden something in his barn, and his 'housekeeper' wants to know what. You will not be disappointed. Finally, I've just read Slapstick, a novel that's a bit like More Than Human (T. Sturgeon), but full of wit and insight. It's about two ugly human creatures that need each other to have a joint intelligence that outstrips the most advanced computers.
Now I still got some five more unread Vonnegut novels on my bookshelf. I expect to be surprised reading each of them.

Vonnegut quotes about men and women

Within a few days I'll post my thoughts and remarks about Vonnegut. Here are some quotes to get started. You can find them in Vonnegut's Timequake novel.

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

"Men are jerks. Women are psychotic."

Aren't we all in some sort of prison? (2)

While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Eugene Debs