Quotes

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I had nothing to do with the script of Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), incidentally. That was the work of Stephen Geller -- and a good job it was. I didn't meet him until after the picture opened. He is a novelist, too, and I asked him which he liked best, writing novels or screenplays. He preferred novels by far, since they were wholly under his control.

A nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

When [Ernest Hemingway] killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon.

If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Always mind what you pretend to be...since you *are* what you pretend to be.

A lot of people think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct. They think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

I would rather have written Cheers (1982) than anything I've written.

What kind of nutcase wants to become a psychiatrist?

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

When you get to be our age [elderly], you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by the people you went to high school with. You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.

There's this form of "Meditation" I've been practicing for years that's relaxing and enlightening; it's called "reading short stories".

There is no immunity to Cuckoo ideas on Earth.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

"Oh, boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch *that* time!"

And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

[Rosewater, to a Shrink] You guys had better come up with some NEW lies, or people aren't going to want to live any more!

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be Gay, the least you can do is go into the Arts!

There was a sign on the Wall saying "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?"

History is just a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Explaining his grudge against Geraldo Rivera: "He's obviously a scumbag, because he started making love to other people and betraying my daughter and her innocence from the very beginning. If I see Jerry again, I'll spit in his face."