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Kurt Vonnegut Quotes about Writing

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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.

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.

Writing, Stories, Radio

Kurt Vonnegut (2011). “A Man Without a Country”, p.24, Seven Stories Press

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.

Life, Writing, Creativity

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

Reading, Believe, Writing

Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

Lying, Writing, Shameless

Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Cat's Cradle: A Novel”, p.5, Dial Press

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Writing, College, Creative

FaceBook post by Kurt Vonnegut from Sep 26, 2012

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Writing, Thinking, Wells

Kurt Vonnegut (2008). “Armageddon in Retrospect”, p.8, Penguin

If you want to really hurt you 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 to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. 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 possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Art, Hurt, Writing

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

Writing, Thinking, Careers

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

Writing, Tired, People

Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

Writing, Character, Two

Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction”, Putnam Publishing Group

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Writing, Editors, Rejection

Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

Writing, Thinking, Our Society

There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it: What is the purpose of life? Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with: To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.

Writing, Eye, Pockets

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

Disappointment, Writing, Laughing

Kurt Vonnegut (1988). “Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut”, p.90, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Writing, Ideas, Doe

Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.

Writing, Interesting, Revelations

Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

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.

Dad, Writing, Stories

"The Best Jokes Are Dangerous, An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Part Three". Interview with J. Rentilly, www.mcsweeneys.net. September 18, 2002.

I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.

Writing, People, Dumb

This is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

Writing, People, Stupidity

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.

Writing, People, Stories

Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

Stupid, Writing, Intelligent

"Player Piano". Book by Kurt Vonnegut, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 1952.

The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

Writing, Fiction, Each Day

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Sweet, Writing, Character

Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction”, Putnam Publishing Group

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

Writing, Humor, Men

"Kurt Vonnegut: In His Own Words". The Times (London), April 12, 2007.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Freedom, Writing, Perfect

Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Bluebeard: A Novel”, p.187, Dial Press

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