Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.

It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.

In Europe they understand that the arts are incredibly important both culturally and economically.

To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

The importance of the arts to the societies in which they thrive is well documented.

The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do.

The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist.

France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they're valued.

I am an important artist. And I make art. Therefore, my opinion matters.

We have become a society where the artist is regarded as a self-indulgent superfluity, and the person who juggles stocks and shares is an essential part of the economy.

Sometimes the European and North American public like some things to be exotic and kept at arm's length. They don't want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that's at least as relevant as what's being done here.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists who were doing interesting thing, but I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists.

No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out.

I think that these are different times, and different things are available to artists, and certain things have become passé. You've already seen the outcome of a lot of things that seemed to have a lot of potential. We've already heard that, and I can't tell you if it made a difference or not. But we already know that artists can do that, and they shouldn't feel threatened by doing it. They're probably not going to change the world. They're going to change a few people's perspectives and maybe make somebody's day at times, if they can.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.