10 Jack Kerouac Quotes on Literature

Jack Kerouac quotes on literature

10. John Clellon Holmes ... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'

13. It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

51. Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.

59. I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

60. Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

61. Some times feeling like Holden Caulfield, sometimes Jack Kerouac

63. You don't know what I'm all about Like killing cops and reading Kerouac

64. If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road - that's what I wanted in my own work.

67. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

68. That's not writing, it's typing.