Jack Kerouac Quotes

The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up to the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, its béat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown.

I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.

The road must eventually lead to the whole world.

As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

"And it's finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for "cities" at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings'll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillnes in the wilds- So I tell myself "Be Wise.

No matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

I'd rather be thin than famous
but I'm fat
paste that in your broadway show

beautiful insane
in the rain

"I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.

Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running — that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach....

There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.

Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.