_sam_hochberg's_blog

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”
Vonnegut was as trenchant when talking about his life as when talking about life in general, and this quote from an essay in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is particularly apt; as he explains it, he wrote Player Piano while working for General Electric, “completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines,” which led him to put some ideas about machines on paper. Then it was published, “and I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.” The entire essay is wry, hilarious, and biting, but this line stands out in particular as typifying the kind of snappishness that made Vonnegut’s works so memorable.

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—	15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will \| Music \| Inventory \| The A.V. Club

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 do not care about them. You are not alone.’

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—	Kurt Vonnegut

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs…

…and developing our wings on the way down.”

…Kurt Vonnegut (unsourced)

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

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—	― Eugène Ionesco

Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

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—	Kurt Vonnegut - Talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope, 2005. PBS

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write…

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.: Alvin Toffler

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor’s office was full of portraits by Picasso.

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—	Rita Rudner

I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress… Man’s relationship with his machinery is thus inherently symbiotic. This has always been the case; it’s only in the electric age that man has an opportunity to recognize this marriage to his own technology… I’m “predicting” what has already happened and merely extrapolating a current process to its logical conclusion.

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—	Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview, 1969

We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.

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—	William Gibson, The Art of Fiction, Paris Review

Colin Chapman, Lotus Cars, On Design

“To add speed, add lightness.”

“Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.”