Jack Kerouac Quotes

When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.

Once I can focus in on something, I just play it in my mind until an idea comes from out of nowhere, and it's usually the key to the whole song. It's the idea that matters. It's like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it.

Thinking visually is my starting point, and then the writing happens.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

The writer's is an interior world, a world of the mind.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it's with you all the time.

I had the landscape in my arms as I painted it. I had the landscape in my mind and shoulder and wrist.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission.

It's funny how you can struggle with one piece and write a better one in a minute. When things come easy, it means it's good.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.

I like to be in the zone. I like being in the studio with the artists, with the producers, with the musicians, feeling it, and going there. I feel like I have a lot of content to start writing about.

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.