Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.
Christopher Kemp, Salon interview, 12 December 2001 source ↗
The question
What would you want written on your gravestone?
2 versions
Earlier wording is kept rather than replaced. This is the record of how the answer moved, not evidence that it should not have.
-
Version 1 superseded 9 Sep 2026Yes, well, I’ve already said so in the books: “Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.”
-
Version 2 Current
Corrected against the source.
Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.
Others on this question
View all 30 →
Marianne Faithfull
English singer and actress
'As Tears Go By'.
Jean-Jacques Burnel
Bass guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the Stranglers
'Shit, I missed that bend!'
Elizabeth McGovern
American actress and musician
My daughter and I saw a tombstone the other day. All it had on it was, "She was a real character." We laughed and laughed. That'll be me.
David Vélez
Co-founder and chief executive of Nubank
The simplicity and yet profoundness of the above logic leads us to conclude that for us the most natural and truthful path is to invest this wealth until "our last check bounces", as one of our personal heroes, Chuck Feeney, likes to say.
More from Kurt Vonnegut
View profile →I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.
Recorded
George Plimpton, David Hayman, David Michaelis and Richard Rhodes, The Paris Review, issue 69, Spring 1977, 1 January 1977
source ↗
More on death & what remains
- How would you want people to remember you? 213 answers
- How close have you come to dying? 209 answers
- What song would you want played at your funeral? 178 answers
- If you had only one day left, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid? 54 answers
- What do you believe happens when we die? 50 answers
- What would you most want to leave your children? 44 answers
Also answered this
James Yorkston, Amiri Baraka, Billy Idol, Rufus Wainwright, David Macklovitch, Derren Brown
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All death & what remains questions
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject