Vonnegut Art Quotes & Sayings

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

This is Kurt Vonnegut in the effing state-of-the-art lethal injection facility in Huntsville, effing, Texas signing off. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations — Kurt Vonnegut

When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the question was asked, "How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?" Dresden, a beautiful city, built in the art spirit, symbol of an admirable heritage, so anti-Nazi that Hitler visited it but twice during his whole reign, food and hospital center so bitterly needed now - plowed under and salt strewn in the furrows. — Kurt Vonnegut

People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write. — Kurt Vonnegut

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. — Kurt Vonnegut

The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art. — Kurt Vonnegut

The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage - and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still - I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art. — Kurt Vonnegut

The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae. — Kurt Vonnegut

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is. — Mark Vonnegut

Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children's games as well-running, jumping, catching, throwing.
Or dancing.
Or singing songs. — Kurt Vonnegut

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'. — Kurt Vonnegut

The arts..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. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was
if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way. — Kurt Vonnegut

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sakes. Now, I mean, I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend
a lousy poem. — Kurt Vonnegut

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on. — Kurt Vonnegut

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut. — Michael Dirda

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives ... .
You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that? — Kurt Vonnegut

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be.[ ... ]We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."
Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield. — Kurt Vonnegut

They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled. — Kurt Vonnegut

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. — Kurt Vonnegut

The function of art is to make people like life more than they do. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Participation in an art, although unrewarded by wealth or fame ... is a way to make one's soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren't a way to make a living. — Kurt Vonnegut

So many people think that practicing an art is a good way to make a living. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend. — Kurt Vonnegut

Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything. — Kurt Vonnegut

You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse. — Mark Vonnegut

I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it? — Kurt Vonnegut

You are being suffocated by tradition ... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art
it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants. — Kurt Vonnegut

I think it's ugly, but I don't know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not. — Kurt Vonnegut

Please don't make the mistake of thinking the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea. You don't have to be unscientific to make beautiful art, to write beautiful things.
If you need proof: Twain, Adams, Vonnegut, McEwen, Sagan, Shakespeare, Dickens. For a start.
You don't need to be superstitious to be a poet. You don't need to hate GM technology to care about the beauty of the planet. You don't have to claim a soul to promote compassion.
Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome. — Tim Minchin

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it. — Kurt Vonnegut

Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday! — Kurt Vonnegut

Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand. — Kurt Vonnegut

Best thunderclap came from Spengler, to the effect that science is either true or false, art is either shallow or deep. Second best came from some Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, I think, to the effect that one man's right to swing his fists stops where another man's nose begins. — Kurt Vonnegut