Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.

Sacrificing everything for one's craft is something some people can't help. They can't help themselves. They must do it. They're driven to do it.

Nothing ever happened except God.

Jack Kerouac seems to have been preoccupied with the question of duality from a very young age. He seemed to feel that there was more than one person inside him. Indeed he would veer from friendly, open and so on to someone who was angry. In a way, there was a swing also between his American self and what he later called his Franco-American older brother. There was a swing between the deeply introverted part of himself and the person he became out in the world, having to act in an extroverted way.

Legend adheres to artists whose deaths seem the corollaries of their works.

A lot of artists don't survive, do they? You work very hard and finally you get what you want and it destroys you.

I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.