Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, artist, and one of the most prominent members of the Beat Generation. While enjoying popular but little critical success during his own lifetime, Kerouac is now considered one of America's most important authors. Kerouac's spontaneous, confessional language style inspired other writers, including Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Bob Dylan.

Quotes

• "I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."

:— Jack Kerouac

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• "If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road — that's what I wanted in my own work."

:— Ray Manzarek, The Doors' keyboard player

Related Topics:
Ray Manzarek - The Doors

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• "I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."

:— Bob Dylan

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• "Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."

:— Allen Ginsberg

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• "The world that trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one".

:— Michael McClure, San Francisco poet

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• Kerouac was "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle" in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence, the intellective void the spiritual drabness".

:— Michael McClure, San Francisco poet

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:— more

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