Jack Kerouac Quotes

I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

The whole idea of punk rock is that you're dressing yourself in a crazy leather jacket with safety pins and a Mohawk. The idea of being the rebel is a boring societal idea. It's such a type. And that's what I was, without knowing it.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

In the mid-'60s, I quit school and wandered across the country, hitchhiked back and forth a few times, and ended up in hippie times, in the street in Toronto, in Yorkville.

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw.

We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

When I was a kid in the '50s, I was very enamored of beatniks and... a kind of dark sensibility.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

N.W.A had something in common with the Rolling Stones and MC5 and groups like that: the voice of rebellion. It's rebellion against your parents. It's rebellion against the system. It's rebellion against society.

I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.

I think for it to be hip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me, had some sense of hope in them.

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.

Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.

I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie.