Humor. Laughing with my girlfriends is one of my great joys.

Loyalty. Not fawning, but a loyalty based on our shared love and history that fosters compassion and forgiveness.

I like all my friends for different reasons, so it’s hard to pick one quality I value most highly overall.

The word says it all. To be a friend means that they are always there, for the good or the bad.

I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming.

The real goal is to make your soul go, not to make a living. Practicing art, even in a mediocre way, can make the soul go.

I’m lucky…that I’m free to do art, and presumably to keep my soul growing, by finding something else to do. Participation in the arts--drawing, dancing, and all that--makes the soul grow. That’s why you engage in it. That’s how you grow a soul.

I don’t much want to play anymore. I enjoyed the game as a young man, but I don’t enjoy it now.

I am from a family of artists. Here I am making a living in the arts, and it has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station. My ancestors were all in the arts, so I’m simply making my living in the customary family way.