If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

the appreciation of teachers, the importance of noticing and acknowledging the small, sweet moments of everyday life by stopping to say, as his Uncle Alex had taught him, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

He told us that one reason he and his friends wanted to start the commune and learn to “live off the land” in a simple way was that “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut said, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?” In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words

Vonnegut neither wrote down to his readers nor tried to go over their heads with wisdom. He was playful at the same time as he was profound,

He had written that “The function of the artist is to make people like life better than before,” and when asked if he’d ever seen that done he answered, “Yes, the Beatles did it.”