As you get older, you get more... genealogical.
— 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.
I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.
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.
I don't really go out at all.
I know who the great poets are.
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
My witness is the empty sky.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
It's hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.
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.
Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
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.
I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.
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.
My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet.
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.
Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
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.
Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.
I really hate to write.
My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.
I'm really Wallace Beery in 'The Champ.'
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.
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.
Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Accept loss forever.
You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.
All of life is a foreign country.
