Kurt Vonnegut on creativity

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007) was an American author and humanist. I imagine his passion for humanitarian issues may have grown after witnessing the allied firebombing of Dresden towards the end of World War II. At the time, he was an American POW trapped in an underground meat locker. That's not the sort of thing that leaves you with a good impression of humanity. Please see my earlier blog on Slaughterhouse-Five for a link to more info on the Dresden Firebombing.

In addition to war,Vonnegut experienced other significant tragedies during his earlier years - his Mother committed suicide on Mother's Day while he was home on leave from the war in 1944. His sister Alice died of cancer only hours after her husband had died in a train crash.

Some of these experiences may lend themselves to Vonnegut's writing style - which typically centres around tragi-comic science fiction storylines. Vonnegut explained in an interview that his forays into outer space surrealism in 'Slaughterhouse-Five' were intended to provide relief to his reader, from the heavy subject of war. I can only imagine these tangents were first employed to provide relief to Vonnegut himself, who had lived first-hand the horrors of war he was tackling in his fiction. The art of fiction itself was perhaps a way to cope with what he had encountered. Art gave Vonnegut the possibility to create something meaningful to share from such utter destruction. Perhaps, in a sense, he was able to escape the heavy burden of what he had witnessed by releasing it to the world.

Read more about Vonnegut's life and career here.

All I really wanted to share here was Vonnegut's below words on creativity, which I love.