Jack Kerouac Quotes

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

I have never considered myself a poet. Therefore, I am not a rival of anyone, and I do not consider anybody my rival.

No art is possible without a dance with death.

the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.

I should be writing a poem every morning but I'm not.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.

When it comes to writers and poets, for me it's Vinicius de Moraes. He's one of the greatest lyricists ever.

Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.

I really want to continue doing art. I would love to go back to doing paintings one day.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.