The Artist Makes His Living by Pretending

I’ve heard that a writer is lucky because he cures himself every day with his work. What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life — this is, if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway — but you won’t know it. And, the thing is, in order to sit alone and work alone all day long, you must be a terrible overreacter. You’re sitting there doing what paranoids do — putting together clues, making them add up…. Putting the fact that they put me in room 471…. What does that mean and everything? Well, nothing means anything — except the artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole, though no such holes exist.

KURT VONNEGUT