Jack Kerouac Quotes

I like to write about the things I care about. It's no fun to sing about things you don't like.

A lot of what I write is very personal.

Most writers write from their own experiences. That is where the honesty and intensity of emotions come from.

My songs are all personal.

I like to write things to be personal, so I just put what I'm thinking about at the time.

When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.

If I write what my soul thinks it will be visible, and the words will be its body.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book [ Max on Life]; for many it just never gets published.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

In my opinion, trying to guess what readers want is the wrong approach. You have to tell your story as best you can and as true to yourself as possible. You have to be honest and fair and vulnerable and foolish and brave, and not care what anyone thinks of it.

I think it's a greater risk not to write about 9\11. If you're in my position - a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about - I think it's risky to avoid what's right in front of you.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?

I've found through experience that I'm only good when I'm writing something that, in essence, only I could write. The times I've written for hire, for other people, I don't think I've done very well.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

I don't think I ever worry too much about what our target audience is, what we should be releasing. I just write naturally and organically and try to write from the heart.

I used to worry I was entirely uninteresting, but the truth is I think if my life was more exciting I'd never have any time to write.