Jack Kerouac Quotes

Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.

Pressure and stress is the common cold of the psyche.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

I'm kind of an insecure artist. I hop from piece to piece. I always think my life depends on every painting. Every painting is my first painting.

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.

Blank paper always symbolizes the anxiety of the painter.

I've only suffered writer's block badly once, and that was during the writing of Chamber of Secrets. I had my first burst of publicity about the first book and it paralysed me. I was scared the second book wouldn't measure up, but I got through it!

Each book gets harder, each book gets harder and harder. I always feel like crying when I have to write.

I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.

Then - as he was talking - a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.

I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!

I think in my late 20s, I was starting to enter that realm of complacency, which is the most terrifying place I can imagine as an artist. I felt time creeping up on me.

I put out one album one week, and I'm already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

Your brain is cooked when you write hard for three or four hours.

If you're a writer, you're constantly doubting yourself.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

I know a lot of artists and chefs don't talk about this, but sometimes you just don't get to the finish line. That honesty and tenderness is something we're kind of not supposed to express.

I struggled with the pressure of having the successful record after the first record. Second album syndrome. I'm living proof; it's very real. It was like a psychological battle to be creative. I used to never feel pressure to be creative; it's always just been a fun thing. And then suddenly it's my job, and people are asking, 'Where's the record?'

I try not to think about the success, because it's pressure to continue making music.

I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.