Quotes from 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.

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.

Back in Hollywood Hospital, there were no scrubs. The doctors were very well dressed, and the patients were in pajamas. The doctor in charge of the whole place wore baby-blue alligator shoes, drove a light blue '59 Cadillac convertible, and wore what I was sure was the button to end the world as a tie clip.

There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, 'It's okay to be an introvert, but I don't want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.'

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.

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

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

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

A world without prejudice, stigma, and discrimination against those who have or are thought to have mental illness would be a better one for everyone. What so-called normal people are doing when they define disease like manic depression or schizophrenia is reassuring themselves that they don't have a thought disorder or an affective disorder, that their thoughts and feelings make perfect sense.

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

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

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.