Top 100 Quotes About Kerouac
#1. Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
Edward Abbey
#2. Around Jack (Kerouac) there circulated a palpable aura of fame and death.
Gary Snyder
#3. Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.
Roger Kimball
#4. Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.
Yann Martel
#5. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing"? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending.
Lynne Truss
#6. I haven't changed my views much since I was about 12, really, I've just got a 12-year-old mentality.When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That's still been a big influence.
David Bowie
#7. The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.
David Bowie
#8. Unable to forgive his own sins, unsatisfied with just the goodness of his heart, [Kerouac] would go on poisoning his body until it rotted around him, rotted, bloated, exploded, and fell away to let the pure Jack Kerouac, the saint, escape free at last - remembered only as a ghost.
Gerald Nicosia
#9. I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.
John Darnielle
#10. It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.
Jerry Stahl
#13. Pound it out, get it done, write every day. No excuses. Kerouac said you can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club. Damn straight. You'll sleep a lot better getting your word count in than another quick Twitter check or keeping up to date on the Kardashians.
Dan Alatorre
#14. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
William S. Burroughs
#15. The actual materials are important ... A book at the nightstand is important-a light you can get at-or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.
Allen Ginsberg
#16. The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.
Gloria Steinem
#17. Before they did all those shows on Jackson Pollock, I loved the way he formulated his paintings. I loved Basquiat - I was into the whole Beat generation, Kerouac, etc., and all those artists talked about that and Kerouac, so I just got in the middle of being spontaneous.
Matt Schulze
#18. I just love crazy people like this,' Murphy said. 'Jack Kerouac people. Mad to live, mad to die, that kind of thing.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
#19. Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer ... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
Hunter S. Thompson
#20. Where Eckhart Tolle meets Jack Kerouac meets Buddha. A free consciousness expanding book to kill Ego, sexual boredom & lack of excitement in life.
Gregor Reti
#21. From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.
Christopher Moore
#23. And when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.
Stephen King
#24. I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].
William S. Burroughs
#25. Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.
Norman Mailer
#26. I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.
Poe Ballantine
#27. I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.
Allen Ginsberg
#28. [Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me ... he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
William S. Burroughs
#29. I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
Hunter S. Thompson
#30. When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
Johnny Depp
#31. Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw.
Garrett Hedlund
#32. Capote's rejoinder to the Kerouac assertion that he never needed to edit his writing: "That's not writing .That's typing.
Joseph Cavano
#33. I was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again influenced by Kerouac.
David Bowie
#34. There's a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N. Y. Times Book Review, who's still chasing Kerouac's corpse with a stiletto.
Allen Ginsberg
#35. Capote's rejoinder to Kerouac's assertion that he never needed to edit his work ... But, that's not writing . That's typing.
Truman Capote
#36. Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Paul Theroux
#37. Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.
K.M. Soehnlein
#38. See, you can't rewrite, 'cause to rewrite is to deceive and lie, and you betray your own thoughts. To rethink the flow and the rhythm, the tumbling out of the words, is a betrayal, and it's a sin, Martin, it's a sin.
Hank (Kerouac)to Martin (Ginsberg) in the film Naked Lunch
David Cronenberg
#39. He mentioned that he didn't like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn't quite true. "I don't like people who like Jack Kerouac," he clarified.
Michael Finkel
#40. Did the tea-time of your soul
Make you long for wilder days
Did you never let Jack Kerouac
Wash over you in waves?
Richard Thompson
#41. I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
Harvey Pekar
#42. Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. O gruesome life, ========== On the Road (Kerouac, Jack)
Anonymous
#43. Jack Kerouac was cool because he had no idea he was.
Dennis Miller
#44. I realized Jack [Kerouac] was deeply committed to writing. Kesey was just as deeply committed to living and experiencing the lives of others; for him writing was just a part of living.
Sterling Lord
#45. Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.
William S. Burroughs
#46. The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
Hanif Kureishi
#47. My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.
Anne Waldman
#48. [Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.
Anne Waldman
#49. Bill said I was 'developing' at a rapid pace and gave me a different kind of book as a 'reward'. It's On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I'm now up to about ten cigarettes a day.
Stephen Chbosky
#50. A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
Edward Abbey
#51. Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
Frank O'Hara
#52. Living this life in the same sorta way that Kerouac lived, you get to hang out at shows and drink and you're able to not really face reality and adulthood the way most of my friends are.
Ben Gibbard
#53. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards ...
Jon Krakauer
#54. I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.
Anne Waldman
#55. One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there a long time without biting and then went away.
Jack Kerouac
#56. I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.
Jack Kerouac
#58. Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.
Jack Kerouac
#59. You dont have to know a soul to know what I know
to expect what I'm expecting
to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day
When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse
Jack Kerouac
#61. Something that you feel will find its own form.
Jack Kerouac
#62. There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look.
Jack Kerouac
#63. And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.
Jack Kerouac
#64. Listen closely ... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.
Jack Kerouac
#65. I've no time
To dally hassel
In your heart's house,
It's too gray
I'm too cold-
I wanta go to Golden,
That's my home.
Jack Kerouac
#66. I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel.
Jack Kerouac
#67. I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.
Jack Kerouac
#68. I see the whole thing popping and parenthesizing in every direction, the story of that house and that kitchen.
Jack Kerouac
#69. I had nothing to offer anybody except for my own confusion
Jack Kerouac
#70. Wishing there was a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.
Jack Kerouac
#71. Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
Jack Kerouac
#72. My eyes were glued on life, and they were full of tears.
Jack Kerouac
#73. Ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you
Jack Kerouac
#74. When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality.
Jack Kerouac
#75. My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
Jack Kerouac
#76. It's not that I can't fall in love. It's really that I can't help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can't distinguish between what's platonic and what isn't, because it's all too much and not enough at the same time.
Jack Kerouac
#77. I stood in the middle of the room flipping and Pusher was plucking at the guitar, just one string, and I went up to him and said, 'Man don't pluck those dirty notes at ME,' and like he just got up without a word and left. [Mardou]
Jack Kerouac
#78. He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it.
Jack Kerouac
#79. I rather like the idea of having all my hours to myself: eating a Fudge Sundae, watching a movie, sleeping on my couch, singing in the bathroom, studying the woods, kidding around with a girl, playing cards lazily - all kinds of stuff that American brands 'shiftless.'
Jack Kerouac
#80. We are sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire.
Jack Kerouac
#81. Istory is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade ...
Jack Kerouac
#82. Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they'll never change, how com-pletely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they WANT- it's MY FATHER MY FATER MY FATHER all over again!
Jack Kerouac
#83. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.
Jack Kerouac
#84. Smith, you don't realize it's a privilege to practice giving presents to others.' The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.
Jack Kerouac
#85. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.
Jack Kerouac
#86. O Rosey,
why don't you stay just home
and eat chocolate bars
and read Boswell
all this society-izing will bring you nothing but lines of anxiety on your face
and a sociable smile ain't nothing but teeth
Jack Kerouac
#87. I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad street lamp with his thumb stuck out
poor forlorn man, poor lost sometime boy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds.
Jack Kerouac
#88. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness - everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being (195).
Jack Kerouac
#90. The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me
Jack Kerouac
#91. I wished Dean and Carlo were there - then I realized they'd be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The
Jack Kerouac
#92. Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot
Jack Kerouac
#93. Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better.
Jack Kerouac
#94. My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go - just go, go, go.
Jack Kerouac
#95. I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters.
Jack Kerouac
#96. I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.
Jack Kerouac
#97. cliches are truisms and all truisms are true
Jack Kerouac
#98. I was getting drunk and didn't care; everything was fine
Jack Kerouac
#99. I'm the golden eternity in mortal animate form.
Jack Kerouac
#100. All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Jack Kerouac
