Quote

And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.

Jack Kerouac

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jack Kerouac
Age: 47 †
Born: 1922
Born: March 13
Died: 1969
Died: October 21
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
East Chelmsford
Massachusetts
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac
Kerouac
Jean-Louis Kerouac
Happiness
Madness
Born
Sorrow
Fear
Ignorance
Kind
Gets
Way
Novel
Joy
Incubator
Wonder
Psychotic
Written
Wonders

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

Image
Always pull back-and see how silly we must look to God.
Jack Kerouac
Image
And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.
Jack Kerouac
Image
What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?
Jack Kerouac
Image
I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact, not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.
Jack Kerouac
Image
...most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.
Jack Kerouac
Image
We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night.
Jack Kerouac
Image
The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick.
Jack Kerouac
Image
He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence
Jack Kerouac
Image
All of life is a foreign country.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.
Jack Kerouac
Image
When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter? And a big soft gust of rain came down. He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?
Jack Kerouac
Image
Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.
Jack Kerouac
Image
The only truth is music.
Jack Kerouac