The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American novelist, journalist
“Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists,” New York Times (1999-05-24)
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Part of the Times "Writers on Writing" series.
In Man Without a Country, ch. 3 "Here Is a Lesson in Creative Writing" (2005), Vonnegut expanded on this:Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Quotations by:
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.
What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know — they’re in color, and they’re talking to the child. Why wouldn’t a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can’t sleep at 3 o’clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they’re charming. Who wouldn’t want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American novelist, journalist
“The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut,” interview by Frank Houston, Salon (8 Oct 1999)
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Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American novelist, journalist
A Man Without A Country, ch. 9 (2005)
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The Beatitudes (Matthew 5).
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American novelist, journalist
Cat’s Cradle, ch. 88 [Bokonon] (1963)
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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Speaking of atheism, I remember one time when Jack Patton and I went to a sermon in Vietnam delivered by the highest-ranking Chaplain in the Army. He was a General.
The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes.
I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way of making a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American novelist, journalist
Man Without a Country, ch. 3 “Here Is a Lesson in Creative Writing” (2005)
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The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.
I told her that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was all the saints I met almost anywhere, people who were behaving decently in an indecent society.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American novelist, journalist
Letter (1992-10-16) to Robert Maslansky
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Phrases used in a number of places by Vonnegut, often as his reply when a woman wrote him to ask if it were right to bring a child into a world as bad as this one; he then encouraged his readers or listeners to become a saint for that child. He also used the phrase to describe the underlying theme of his writing.
Other variants:I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places.
[Timequake, ch. 62 (1997)]I replied that what made living almost worthwhile for me were the saints I met. They could be anywhere. They were people who behaved decently in an indecent society.
[Kevin Alexander Bacon, ed., At Millennium's End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Foreword (1998-11-11) (2001)]What makes life worth living are the saints I meet -- they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.
["Vonnegut Unbound," Interview by Christopher R. Blazejewski, The Harvard Crimson (2000-05-12)]I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.
[Lecture (2003-09-22), University of Wisconsin, Madison; reprinted in "Knowing What's Nice," In These Times (2003-11-06)]What makes life worth living are the saints. You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.
[Frequently quoted version]