Quotes from Mark 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.

Maybe just being open to things being connected made us see more. Now I shudder whenever I find that sort of connectedness creeping into my life.

If you want to pick out the people who go crazy from time to time in my family, find the ones in the photos who look ten or more years younger than they actually are. Maybe it's because we laugh and cry a lot and have a hard time figuring out what to do next. It keeps the facial muscles toned up.

A surgeon in charge of my surgery rotation said that he knew who I was but that he was going to treat me as if I was normal. I sincerely thanked him and told him I would try to act that way.

Back in Hollywood Hospital, there were no scrubs. The doctors were very well dressed, and the patients were in pajamas. The doctor in charge of the whole place wore baby-blue alligator shoes, drove a light blue '59 Cadillac convertible, and wore what I was sure was the button to end the world as a tie clip.

I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.

There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, 'It's okay to be an introvert, but I don't want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.'

It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.

Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.

The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.