10 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Creativity

Kurt Vonnegut quotes on creativity

7. You learn about life by the accidents you have, over and over again, and your father is always in your head when that stuff happens. Writing, most of the time, for most people, is an accident and your father is there for that, too. You know, I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work. Your father won't let it happen.

22. 'You think I'm insane?' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. 'You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.' 'Barely - barely.' 'A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.' Finnerty shook his head. 'He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.' He nodded, 'Big, undreamed-of things - the people on the edge see them first.'

76. This script, it seems to me, is the work of professionals who yearned to be as charming as inspired amateurs can sometimes be.

83. Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

88. I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again. Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but the half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here. What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this: This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this: What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe. And so on. Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

126. I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

158. I think yet again of my father, who struggled to become a painter after he was forced into early and unwelcome retirement by the Great Depression. He has reason to be optimistic about his new career, since the early stages of his pictures, whether still or portraits or landscapes, were full of pow. Mother, meaning to be helpful, would say of each one: 'That's really wonderful, Kurt. Now all you have to do is finish it.' He would then ruin it. I remember a portrait he did of his only brother, Alex, who was an insurance salesman, which he called 'Special Agent'. When he roughed it in, his hand and eye conspired with a few bold strokes to capture several important truths about Alex, including a hint of disappointment. Uncle Alex was a proud graduate of Harvard, who would rather have been a scholar of literature than an insurance man. When Father finished the portrait, made sure every square inch of masonite had its share of paint, Uncle Alex had disappeared entirely. We had a drunk and lustful Queen Victoria instead. This was terrible.

200. Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?

227. When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

236. The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.