Jack Kerouac Quotes

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

I get so much inspiration from my travels, but I also started an exercise where I write down so many words every week. Then I begin crossing them off. We create a grid of words and also images, but words for me are more ample because you can interpret them your own way.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

Make good art.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

I love making up titles.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

The drawing is already partly there - it's in the paper. And the paper is talking before you do.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

I think when you're being creative, you still attach it to reality somehow.

Art and life are inseparable.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

You can't slot a time and a space and think 'ok now it's time to sit and compose.' It just doesn't work like that for me.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

The artist in me welcomes another opportunity to be creative.