Jack Kerouac Quotes

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

- Jack Kerouac

The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.

- Jack Kerouac

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

- Jack Kerouac

All of life is a foreign country.

- Jack Kerouac

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

- Jack Kerouac

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

- Jack Kerouac

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.

- Jack Kerouac

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

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

- Jack Kerouac

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

- Jack Kerouac

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

- Jack Kerouac

I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.

- Jack Kerouac

The Catholic Church is a weird church. Much mysticism is sown broadspread from its ritual mysteries till it extends into the very lives of its constituents and parishoners.

- Jack Kerouac

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

- Jack Kerouac

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

- Jack Kerouac

It's hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.

- Jack Kerouac

I'm really Wallace Beery in 'The Champ.'

- Jack Kerouac

I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.

- Jack Kerouac

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

- Jack Kerouac

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.

- Jack Kerouac

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

- Jack Kerouac

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.

- Jack Kerouac

My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet.

- Jack Kerouac

My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.

- Jack Kerouac

I know who the great poets are.

- Jack Kerouac

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

- Jack Kerouac

Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.

- Jack Kerouac

As you get older, you get more... genealogical.

- Jack Kerouac

Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.

- Jack Kerouac

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

- Jack Kerouac

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

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

- Jack Kerouac

You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.

- Jack Kerouac

My witness is the empty sky.

- Jack Kerouac

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

Accept loss forever.

- Jack Kerouac

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

- Jack Kerouac

I really hate to write.

- Jack Kerouac