P.S. The last time I saw you, you were certainly one of the nicest people I had ever seen. Now I hear that you are learning to dance. That makes you just about perfect.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
30th September 1965

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Gail Godwin
25th November 1967

There’s no hope in war.

Kurt Vonnegut 
Letter to the Draft Board
28th November 1967

Advice my father gave me: Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his son, Mark
7th May 1969

I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
20th November 1971

You are dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well—I feel as though I’ve lost the years since Slaughterhouse-Five was published, but that’s malarky. Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the year in which Mark went crazy, then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
20th November 1971

Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
20th September 1972

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Charles McCarthy
16th November 1973

I thank you for your comments on how slowly my literary reputation is dying. Part of the problem, surely, is that all my books remain in print, and people continue to give me credit for having written them.

Kurt Vonnegut 
Letter to critic Anatole Broyard
19th April 1981

I am off to the city tomorrow, Thursday, and then to the outskirts of Chicago, to Harper College, where I will tell my audience about the pregnant woman who asked me in a letter if it was wrong to bring an innocent baby into a world as awful as this one. I told her that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was all the saints I met almost anywhere, people who were behaving decently in an indecent society. I will tell the audience that I hope some among them will become saints for her child to meet.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Robert Maslansky
16th October 1992

I myself wonder about rattlesnakes and lightning bugs. Only a completely humorless person could believe that such preposterously elaborate Dr. Seuss creatures could be the result of judicious shopping in the marriage market, so to speak. I have the same problem with the Big Bang Theory. Anybody with a sense of humor has to laugh.

Kurt Vonnegut 
Letter to Stephen Jay Gould
6th March 1999

It may give us some comfort in these worrisome times to know that in all of history only one country has actually been crazy enough to detonate atomic weapons in the midst of civilian populations, turning unarmed men, women and children into radioactive soot and bonemeal. And that was a long, long time ago now.

Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to the New York Times
12th September 2002

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 
Letter to Xavier High School 
5th November 2006

I cannot be of any use to you and your students nowadays, alas, since, at 84, I resemble nothing so much as an iguana, hate travel, and have nothing to say. I might as well send a spent Roman candle in my stead.

Kurt Vonnegut 
Letter to Professor Alice Fulton
6th February 2007

Most—but not all—of the above excerpts come from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, a superb collection of Vonnegut’s correspondence ably edited by his friend, Dan Wakefield. According to a sum I just did1, that book was published a decade ago; and yet still I return regularly to my well-thumbed copy, the vast majority of its pages folded at the corner.

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