"Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac"
- Frank O'Hara
"If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems..."
- Sarah Vowell
"Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you ..."
- Alison Winfield Burns
"I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience ..."
- Joyce Johnson
"writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an "urban Thoreau") set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of "work,..."
- Elizabeth Gilbert
"For Kerouac, the embodiment of American Zen was Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buddhist poet and essayist, who he fictionalized as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a practicing Budd..."
- Joel Dinerstein
"I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equal..."
- Jack Kerouac
"I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved."
"...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad."
"...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...Page 100."