Kerouac Quotes

Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I've spent away from my family and loved ones, I'm starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There's a darkness inside of me that I'm only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it's starting to scare me. (Ben Gibbard)
If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.
Ben Gibbard
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac.
Frank O'Hara
I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
Harvey Pekar
"What are you trying to do, Kerouac?" I'd ask myself in my sleepingbag at night, "trying to deny reality with all this Buddha stuff, ya jerk?" ... "Poor detailed immaculate incarnate fool, and you call yourself Self ... Take off your coat and crash wits." And I realized that all this Buddhism was a STRAIN at telling the untellable emptiness yet that nothing was truer, a perfect paradox.
Jack Kerouac
Members of the generation that came of age after World War II-Korean War who join in a relaxation of social and sexual tensions, and who espouse anti-regimentation, mystic-disaffiliation, and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of cold-war disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac.
Jack Kerouac
hey Jack Kerouac I think of your mother and the tears she cried, she cried for none other than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and that dared to drag him down her little boy courageous who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood hip flask slinging madman, steaming cafe flirts they all spoke through you.
Natalie Merchant
The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
Hanif Kureishi
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
The fifties were supposed to be a golden age when the pig had everything his way. That's what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal?
Rudy Rucker
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)
I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.
Garrett Hedlund
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
To be able to play Jack Kerouac or Sal Paradise, it's mad to me.
Rupert Penry-Jones
What are you trying to do, Kerouac? I'd ask myself in my sleepingbag at night, trying to deny reality with all this Buddha stuff, ya jerk?... Poor detailed immaculate incarnate fool, and you call yourself Self ... Take off your coat and crash wits.
Jack Kerouac
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
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
Kerouac had lots of class - stumbling drunk in the end, but read those last books. He never blames anybody else; he always blames himself.
Ken Kesey
You don't know what I'm all about / Like killing cops and reading Kerouac.
Blake Schwarzenbach
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Paul Theroux
I have no interest in Kerouac whatsoever. I've done my stint for him. As far as I'm concerned, Kerouac is what Madison Avenue wants a rebel to be. That isn't my kind of rebel. (Kenneth Rexroth)
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
Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious. Psychologically, he was a mess-as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac lacked the knack of sanctifying his pathologies and inducing others to bow down in obeisance.
Allen Ginsberg
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
America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.
Jaron Lanier