Practical Advice - Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's Advice to His Children

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[Vonnegut's advice is equally valid and valuable to all children anywhere and everywhere.]

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

- ... My good advice to you is to pay somebody to teach you to speak some foreign language, to meet with you two or three times a week and talk. Also: get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument. ....

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

- .... I am going to order you to do something new, if you haven’t done it already. Get a collection of the short stories of Chekhov and read every one. Then read “Youth” by Joseph Conrad. I’m not suggesting that you do these things. I am ordering you to do them.

- ... 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 glow.