Jack Kerouac Quotes

Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.

Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw.

People and poets are marching together. Art is henceforth on a popular footing in the arena with the masses.

It's weird because I think of movies like Reality Bites or something, where, even though my life was nothing like that, I hadn't done something contemporary for a while, and it's easier. You do try to make something your own.

I try to think about me, as an audience member, and it [inspiration for movies] comes from there.

I usually have to find something where I go, "I have to do this." Sometimes you don't even know what the question you're trying to answer is, but you go, "This is something I need to explore and want to explore, and it's inside me in a way that I think I can do a good job with."

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it was when the baby boomers, who let's face it, take up a lot of space on the planet, were young.

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

The only planning I do is about a minute before I play. I desperately try to think of something that will be effective, but I never sit down and work it out note for note.

Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.

When you're trying to come up with an idea for a movie it's actually the hardest part - the germ of the idea. Inevitably you think of something that would be great and then discover that it was on an episode of The Simpsons.

The most important thing... was to change their spirit; and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I decided to promote literary movement.

I'm trying to make something every time that feels new and surprises people. Hopefully at least one person. But it's not like I turn it off. I don't make a movie and then go back to my normal life. When I'm finishing one movie the next day I'm thinking about the next one.

We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on.

I don't have an idea for a play until after I've finished writing it. I write first, and come up with what it's about later. My technique could be compared to having a large canvas and coming in every day and putting a dot on it somewhere, and after several years - literally - I begin to say, That reminds me of an elephant, so I think I'll make it one.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

I've had people appear in my life that have helped me. I had more fun. I approached it thinking how would Jack Nicholson, "How would he do it?" So that's really what I did was I created this Gremlin character. So now people come up and they say 'Oh The Exorcist!'.. and I'm like "Did you see Repossessed?" They say either no or yes or whatever, and I say look at this, have a laugh, and then go back and look at a masterpiece.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.