“One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you descri...” — Kurt Vonnegut Quote

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

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

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

We're all human beings; people make mistakes.

As parents, we're human beings, too, but sometimes we're not as understanding as we'd like to be.

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human beings who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.