I was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again influenced by Kerouac.
I haven't changed my views much since I was about 12, really, I've just got a 12-year-old mentality. When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That's still been a big influence.
Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.
Kerouac was a breeze, some kind of incredible super-American, mythos personality blasting through the highways of 1947 America.
I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].
Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.
When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones. " That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos.
In my teen years and early twenties I was really interested in this fellaheen worlds that, of course, Kerouac invokes and wanting to go below the border and wanting to get to these other places or interstices of the culture where you were encountering the realities of these other kinds of cultures, experiences, language, I think of jazz culture of course.
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
Kerouac was this kid who exemplified something happening.
The actual materials are important. . . A book at the nightstand is important-a light you can get at-or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.
Jack Kerouac was cool because he had no idea he was.
