Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you've found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don't know.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

Journalism is not an exact science. At best it i a crude art.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.

If you're a fan of anything I do, I'm always telling a story. I'm into that - I like it when you don't know if it was true or not.

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as it was said to me.

XXVIII "Truth," said a traveller, "Is a rock, a mighty fortress; "Often have I been to it, "Even to its highest tower, "From whence the world looks black." "Truth," said a traveller, "Is a breath, a wind, "A shadow, a phantom; "Long have I pursued it, "But never have I touched "The hem of its garment." And I believed the second traveller; For truth was to me A breath, a wind, A shadow, a phantom, And never had I touched The hem of its garment.

A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.

You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.

There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

No single person who has ever lived will be able to tell you what happens. Period. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong.

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?' Mr. Okamoto: 'That's an interesting question?' Mr. Chiba: 'The story with animals.' Mr. Okamoto: 'Yes. The story with animals is the better story.' Pi Patel: 'Thank you. And so it goes with God.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.