Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

I think everybody has a secret life.

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

Beyond the beauty, the sex, the titillation, the surface, there is a human being. And that has to emerge.

I actually think it's harder to play vulnerability, because you're having to delve deeper into portions of your own psyche, what it is that makes you human.

Even ordinary people aren't ordinary, not really. They're filled up with thoughts and feelings that you might never know are there until they suddenly materialise.

Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.

All of us are private to ourselves. Nobody ever really knows anybody else. Everybody in the world keeps something to themselves.

I definitely have a lot of different layers inside of me.

You can see into people's souls through their eyes.

Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.

My Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.

Secrets of the heart are seldom news.

The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.

Film is about what you are thinking. It's about what's inside.

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.

You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.

I have trouble describing characters because there is just too much going on in human beings.

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.

Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.