Originally published 2019-01-10.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) is best known for Slaughterhouse-Five, but readers return to him for something beyond plot: a plain-spoken, funny and deeply humane view of how to live. Distilled from his novels, essays, letters and interviews, his advice comes down to a handful of ideas. Be kind. Read. Make things, even badly. Laugh at what hurts. Stand up to censorship. Slow down and enjoy ordinary errands. Treat every life as precious.
Here are ten of those lessons, with the background that gives them weight, and a word of caution about how his famous lines are often quoted.
Who Vonnegut was, and why his advice lands
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on 11 November 1922. As a young American soldier he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and held as a prisoner of war in Dresden. When Allied bombers struck the city between 13 and 15 February 1945, killing around 25,000 people, he survived with other prisoners in a meat locker deep under a slaughterhouse. Afterwards he was put to work recovering bodies from the ruins.
That experience took more than twenty years to become Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969. It made him famous and shaped everything he wrote. Vonnegut was an atheist and a humanist, and he served as honorary president of the American Humanist Association. Humanism, in his hands, was not a cold philosophy. It was the belief that people should be decent to one another because it is the right thing to do, not because they expect a reward.
Lessons 1 to 3: kindness, reading and making art
1. Kindness is the one rule
In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), the eccentric millionaire Eliot Rosewater imagines what he would say at a baptism. After a short welcome to the planet and its weather, he gives the babies the only rule he knows: "God damn it, you've got to be kind." It is probably the most quoted line Vonnegut ever wrote, and it works because it is gruff rather than sentimental. Kindness is presented not as a nice extra but as the bare minimum.
2. Reading is a kind of meditation
In his autobiographical collection Palm Sunday (1981), Vonnegut described reading and writing as the most nourishing forms of meditation people have found. His point was that a book lets you think alongside some of the most interesting minds in history, almost as if you were sharing their thoughts. In an age of short videos and endless feeds, setting aside time for long, quiet reading is one of the simplest ways to follow his advice.
3. Art is for growing, not for fame
Vonnegut drew as well as wrote. His own felt-tip sketches appear in Breakfast of Champions (1973), and he later exhibited his artwork. His 1987 novel Bluebeard follows an elderly Abstract Expressionist painter and asks what makes art meaningful. In his final book, the essay collection A Man Without a Country (2005), he urged readers to practise an art however well or badly they could, whether singing in the shower, dancing to the radio or writing a clumsy poem for a friend, because doing so makes the soul grow.
A widely shared letter he sent in 2006 to a class of high school students who had written to him makes the same argument: make something every day, not for money or applause, but to discover what is inside you.
Lessons 4 to 6: patience, dark humour and standing firm
4. Patience beats talent
Vonnegut liked to deflate the idea of the writer as genius. In one often-quoted passage he joked that novelists are no smarter than anyone else; their real power is patience. Writing, he suggested, lets an ordinary person seem clever by returning to the same thought again and again, improving it slightly each time, much as you might fill a blimp using only a bicycle pump. The lesson applies far beyond fiction: most good work is the result of steady revision, not inspiration.
5. Humour can carry grief
His books treat war, suicide, poverty and environmental collapse, yet they are full of jokes. The refrain So it goes, which follows every death in Slaughterhouse-Five, is both darkly funny and devastating. Vonnegut used comedy as a way to get readers to look straight at things they would rather avoid. Laughter did not make tragedy smaller; it made it possible to talk about.
6. Stand up for what you believe
In 1973 the school board in Drake, North Dakota, objected to the language in Slaughterhouse-Five, which a 26-year-old English teacher, Bruce Severy, had given his class. Thirty-two copies were burned in the school furnace, and some students who refused to hand theirs back were ignored. On 16 November 1973 Vonnegut wrote to the board's chairman, Charles McCarthy. He argued that anyone who actually read his books would find they asked people to be kinder and more responsible, that rough dialogue simply reflected how people talk, and that books are sacred to free people for good reasons. He never received a reply. The letter is now a classic text in debates about book banning.
Lessons 7 and 8: laughter and the joy of small errands
7. Laughter is easier to clean up
Vonnegut saw laughter and tears as two responses to the same frustration and exhaustion. Given the choice, he said he preferred to laugh, because "there is less cleaning up to do afterward." Psychologists have long noted that humour can help people cope with stress and keep perspective, though it works best alongside, not instead of, facing a problem honestly.
8. Go out and buy one envelope
In a PBS interview, and again in A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut told a story about his wife asking why he did not simply order envelopes in bulk. He preferred to walk to the shop and buy a single one, because the errand meant chatting with people, watching the street and waving at a passing fire engine. His summary of the moral was that we are here on Earth "to fart around." Behind the joke is a serious point about technology: convenience can quietly strip out the small human encounters that make a day feel good.
Lessons 9 and 10: valuing life and changing the world
9. Every life is precious
Having seen a beautiful city reduced to ashes and been made to dig out the dead, Vonnegut had no patience for anyone who treated human lives as expendable. His anti-war stance runs through his novels and speeches. He also had a lifelong worry about humanity's treatment of the planet, a theme that grew stronger in his late essays.
10. Change starts small
Vonnegut did not offer grand programmes. He hoped readers would ask better questions, treat others more gently and find meaning in what they made and did. His advice to young people was consistent: create something, look after one another and do not wait for permission to become who you are.
The short animated video below offers a lively introduction to why his books still matter, even for people who have never read one.
A note on quoting Vonnegut
Two cautions help when using Vonnegut as a source of life advice. First, many lines are spoken by characters, and some of those characters are unreliable, foolish or in crisis. Eliot Rosewater's "be kind" speech is moving, but in the novel Rosewater is a troubled figure, and a scheming lawyer even tries to have him declared insane. Reading the scene in context deepens the line rather than weakening it.
Second, Vonnegut is one of the most misquoted writers online. A famous "commencement speech" urging graduates to wear sunscreen was in fact a 1997 newspaper column by Mary Schmich, falsely circulated under his name. When a quote seems too polished or too neat, check the book or letter it supposedly comes from.
The best way to learn from him is the simplest: read the books. Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle and Mother Night are good places to start, and A Man Without a Country gives his late thoughts in his own warm, cranky voice.
Sources: Wikipedia: Kurt Vonnegut; Wikipedia: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Farnam Street: Kurt Vonnegut's letter on book burning; Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, April 2012. The idea for this list came from a piece at Educate Inspire Change.
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