Jack Kerouac Quotes

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Frank Ocean would be incredible; I'd love to be a sponge and absorb everything he says. Every song he puts out, I'm like, 'Why didn't I think of this?'

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful toneis silenced.

Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent; genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.

Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.

genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness.

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.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.

If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.

Most geniuses are weird.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

In the creative industries, there are few things more exciting than a zinger - a thought, idea, line, plot device - anything really, that just totally works in a fundamentally new and fresh way. It's like a uniquely lovely melody or a new taste idea in cooking. Something special, something new, something wonderful. They're also very rare.

If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity.

Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

A genius is someone with the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable.

I think if you're gonna do something as silly and lighthearted as entertainment, then why not be interesting when you're doing it?

There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do.

Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.