Breakfast of Champions tells the story of the events that lead up to the meeting of Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, the meeting itself, and the immediate aftermath. Trout is a struggling science fiction writer who, after their fateful meeting, becomes successful and wins a Nobel Prize; Hoover is a wealthy businessman who is going insane, sent over the brink by his encounter with Trout.

Kurt Vonnegut's Quotes

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

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.


The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. 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.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Author Facts

• That time Vonnegut graded his own books. He gave himself an A+ for Slaughterhouse Five, a B- for Welcome to the Monkey House, a C for Breakfast of Champions, and a D forHappy Birthday, Wanda June. 
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• Speaking of grades, Vonnegut had to leave Butler University in Indiana after being unable to manage more than a C in his English courses. Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Kurt Vonnegut… was there a famous smart person who actually did WELL in school?
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• Speaking of higher education, apparently, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, mechanical engineering, and anthropology at a few different colleges but never completed any of his majors during his lifetime.
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• here’s a really fun claim that Dr. Seuss and Kurt Vonnegut were college classmates and fraternity brothers that was disproved by Snopes. Boo, I hate when the lie out-awesomes the truth. Still, there is a fun fact in here–according to Vonnegut, in a piece from his autobiographical collage A Fate Worse Than Death, in the building used by Vonnegut’s fraternity there WERE a bunch of cartoons on the wall penciled by Theodore Geisel AKA Seuss. So the truth has a SCOCH of weird to it.
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• Towards the middle of February 1976, Vonnegut’s mailbox filled up with sympathy cards from strangers but NO ONE HAD DIED. Finally, Vonnegut remembered that February 13, 1976 was the day Billy Pilgrim dies in Slaughterhouse-Five. 
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• He survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1944 only to be sent home with frostbite in 1945. No wonder Vonnegut wrote the way he did. Vonnegut’s life was a Vonnegut story.
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• Vonnegut was a luddite who never switched to computers because he loved the tactile feeling of writing on a typewriter. Kurt, you were such a gangster. Kurt, you were also SUCH an old person.
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• Vonnegut was a lifelong smoker, which in itself is not weird, but his reasoning, that it was “a classy way to commit suicide,”. 
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• According to the Saturday Evening Post, Vonnegut always wrote by the light of his red rooster lamp.