Jennifer Waite > Jennifer's Quotes

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”
― Hemingway, Ernest

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“My eyes were glued on life
and they were full of tears.”
― Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

“Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last.”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches

“I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“O hell, I'm sick of life - If I had any guts I'd drown myself in that tiresome water but that wouldn't be getting it over at all, I can just see the big transformations and plans jellying down there to curse us up in some other wretched suffering form eternities of it - I guess that's what the kid feels - She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
”
― Jack Kerouac

“Though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are still pretty glorious. ”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it.
'I love love,' she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I'll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth.”
― Jack Kerouac

“The beauty of things must be that they end.”
― Jack Kerouac, Tristessa

“Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.’ You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is ‘success’, the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit.”
― Jack Kerouac