Kurt Vonnegut’s Advice for Writers

“Write to make your soul grow.”

Kurt Vonnegut says fiction is an art form unto its own.

“All of fiction is a practical joke—making people care, laugh, cry or be nauseated or whatever by something which is absolutely not going on at all.

“It’s like saying, ‘Hey, your pants are on fire.’ “

One of his pieces of advice I most appreciate:

“Don’t worry about getting into the profession. Write anyway to make your soul grow.

“That’s what the practice of any art is, it isn’t to make a living, it’s to make your soul grow.”

From interview: Vonnegut on Fiction, in Writing Fiction Today, Winter 2001, a specialty publication from Writer’s Digest.

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Related articles:

Kurt Vonnegut: This guesser or that one.

Madness and creativity: do we need to be crazy? – Nancy Andreasen, M.D.: “As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut — dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut — will always be one of my favorites.”

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