Jack Kerouac Quotes

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

I don't know why I write what I write.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

[Writing] is almost like those boats that sit really low in the water; they look kind of ugly. And then you get one of them up to 80 miles an hour and the hull comes up, and it's a beautiful thing. I'm okay with that for myself.

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

In political life, dissatisfaction is remedied, or at least combated, through action. For as long as you are not totally satisfied, you remain active and keep going. In literary life, at some point you have to stop and allow others to read what you have written. I find that difficult. I am probably too proud. In any case, that is why I have never published anything. But I do plan to do so one day.

The few words of a title are the hardest words for any author to come up with.

Reading taught me how to write.

When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

And that's what I've learned too: writing is key.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

I love to write.

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.

I write constantly about everything.

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I love writing different things.