Mark Vonnegut Quotes

“Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950's, he was employed for Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported back to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again.”

— Mark Vonnegut

Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

— Mark Vonnegut

“With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you're zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“I saw a study the other day showing that some atypical anti-psychotic was at least as good as mood stabilizers in preventing suicide. It's a very good thing to decrease suicide but we should care at least a little if I'm not killing myself because I feel better or if I just can't remember where I put the damn gun.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service”

— Mark Vonnegut

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

— Mark Vonnegut

I often took him as one of God's little jokes on me. When I was in desperate trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No no no. It was a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs, wears baby-blue alligator shoes, and appears to have the emotional depth of a slightly retarded potato.

— Mark Vonnegut

“Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Are people who have been crazy held to unfair standards?
Of course, but it's not in your best interest to complain. If you're paranoid and people are looking at you funny it's best to let it pass. Psychotic people have an uncanny knack for making their own worst dreams come true. Depressing things happen to depressed people way beyond what you would expect from random distribution.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“If nothing I say sparks any thoughts or identification, it's possible you're taking too much medication. If it's the greatest talk you've ever heard, you're not taking enough.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.”

— Mark Vonnegut

I'm not an expert on the Middle East or terrorism or the use of military force or politics. It's all I can do to know a little bit about how to help people raise their kids and what to do when they get sick. When a war happens, I just hope it gets over with quickly so that how we take care of children becomes more important again.

— Mark Vonnegut

“I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Note to self: being Kurt's son, being an ex-mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you'll find that there's not much there. But if you add up a lot of things that aren't in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something ...”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“The first meeting I really remember with the good doctor was when I was starting to be able to speak English again and making a brave attempt to regain some of my dignity. Trying to be very sane, I went up to him and asked if he was my doctor. He said he didn't think so.
"You're Dr. Dale, aren't you?"
"Why, Mark, of course. I didn't recognize you with clothes on." He had a talent for saying just the right thing.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms
it's to frighten off extroverts”

— Mark Vonnegut

“My parents were told by the principal of West Barnstable Elementary School and my teacher that I was a bright boy whose spelling was in the retarded range and whose handwriting was the worst they'd ever seen. I find it embarrassing that I spell so badly. I will do almost anything to avoid being embarrassed, but no effort either on my part or on the part of any teacher has ever dented my utter bafflement when it comes to choosing which letters to put down, how many, and in what order.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“The other day a patient told me that he had gotten into what was a very good college. 'It's not Harvard,' he said.
'Harvard's not Harvard either,' I answered.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.”

— Mark Vonnegut

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

— Mark Vonnegut

“Rarely are there big heroic choices that will settle matters once and for all. The smallest positive step is probably the right one. Try not to argue. If you're right, you don't need to argue. If you're wrong, it won't help. If you're okay, things will be okay. If you're not okay, nothing else matters.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“My father was a proudly antisocial man who spent most of his time at a typewriter, reflecting negatively on his neighbors and society, throwing in things like "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." The emphasis was on the Goddamn it. He was proud of the fact that I had no friends”

— Mark Vonnegut

“When I talk to the National Alliance on
Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient
support groups, I take questions at the
end. At one talk I was asked, "What's
the difference between yourself and
someone without mental illness?"
At another talk I was asked, "How do
you make the voices be not so mean?"
I wish I knew.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“I'm subject to occasional theological nightmares. The one that leaves me in a cold sweat every time is, I arrive at the pearly gates and the first thing I'm asked is where I went to college.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“A happy person with decent self-esteem wouldn't bother to have credentials as good as mine.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“The road to medical school started with a job mowing lawns I was far from sure I could handle.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“The Doc. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don't know who else would be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“But my biggest joy and best education and proudest achievement has been being able to show up for work and life and not cause too much trouble a day at a time in spite of my hysterical, somewhat dramatic, nature.”

— Mark Vonnegut

At the time I would have endorsed the radical notions of R. D. Laing that insanity was a sane reaction to an insane society. Leaving the insane society to set up an independent self-sufficient commune seemed like a very sensible noble brave thing to do-plus it figured to be good for my mental health. Had I gone crazy in Boston or New York I would have blamed my culture and society without a second thought. The arguments were all packed, polished, and ready to fly.

— Mark Vonnegut

“Medical care has become a lot of crust and precious little pie.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“I'm willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.”

— Mark Vonnegut

“My only hope was to be polite.”

— Mark Vonnegut

As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.

— Mark Vonnegut

Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.

— Mark Vonnegut

“Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.”

— Mark Vonnegut