Jack Kerouac Quotes

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.

Don't do anyone else's version of a hit song - it's gonna sound terrible. You just have to do what you do well and crank it up to 11.

On every new project, I try to write in a different way and see if there's a new side of myself I haven't explored.

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called 'pretentious' by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.

The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don't do that. I just keep doing different things.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

I don't think anybody came into the movie business to be unoriginal and plagiarising and not having an original idea in their brain.

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

Originality is undetected plagiarism.

I'm a person who is always trying to write in a different vein.

I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

When I teach writing, I have a mantra: 'Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.'

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.