Kurt Vonnegut's Final Thoughts

Picked up an in-flight magazine and there was a great 2007 interview with the late Kurt Vonnegut, whose works I have never read but now plan to. Here are some gems:

On choosing a life of creation:
I always say to people, practice an art, no matter how well or badly you do it, because then you have the experience of becoming, and it makes your soul grow... I speak with real painters and real artists from time to time about when they get their rocks off, and it's the process of actually doing it. The rest of it--rave reviews or flops, or whatever--is just noise to them. It's the doing that matters, the becoming. The rest of it doesn't matter.

On the decline of literature:
I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It's an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I've said that to open a novel is to arrive in a a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.

On reading as a pastime:
There are all these other things to do with time. It used to be people would wonder what the hell they were going to do for the winter. Then a big book would come out--a big, wonderful book--and everybody would be reading it to pass the time. It was a very primitive experiment, before television, where people would have to look at ink on paper, for God's sake. ...Now you don't have to be literate to have a good time.

On television as one of the most viable art forms today:
It works like a dream. It's a way to hold attention, and it's awfully good at that. For a lot of people, TV is life itself. Churches used to provide people with better company than they had at home, but now, no matter what your neighborhood life or family life is like, you turn on the television and you get relatives, family. I don't know if you've heard about this, but scientists have created baby geese that believe that an airplane is their mother. Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is part of that. I have seen episodes of TV that would have been major Broadway plays in the '20s and '30s. That's where so much of our great writing is going on, if very rarely.