Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life.

While making "Possessed", I wept each morning on my drive to the studio, and I wept all the way back home. I found it impossible to sleep at night, so I'd lie in bed contemplating the future. I fear it with all my heart and soul even as I fear the dark.

It is related of an Englishman that he hanged himself to avoid the daily task of dressing and undressing.

I had to do this album. I tried thinking, "I'm not going to do it." But then I'm sitting there getting all suicidal and depressed, and I just start writing. It's like this inner drive. If I could choose, I would probably be living in the countryside and be fine with that, but I'm not.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

I never knew Kurt to be suicidal. I just knew that he was going through a really tough time.

I think my first bout of that was when I was doing me and My Girl, funnily enough. I really didn't change my clothes or answer the phone, but went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk. She said: “The only thing I could do was write. I used to crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write, and then I was alright, because I was not present. “Sense and Sensibility really saved me from going under, I think, in a very nasty way.

Comedians on the stage are invariably suicidal when they get home.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

Kill me, I don't care. I do not want to be on this Earth anymore.

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.

Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

Madness is a kind of mental suicide.

Voices in the darkness scream away my mental health, can I ask a question to help me save me from myself?

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)

I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.

He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled on a photograph of his wife with his dying hand goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

[However], the sufferer from depression has no option, and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must ... present a face approximating the one associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod, and frown and, God help him, even smile.

I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.

Although one is not inclined to be timid or nervous, it is nevertheless a trifle depressing to receive letters full of expostulation and entreaty: 'If you are determined to commit suicide, why not come home and do so in a quiet lady-like manner?'