"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
JACK KEROUAC
A generation of writers,
Of jazz,
and drugs.
A generation based on madness,
Travels,
and love.
A generation both admired and hated,
an historical American generation of the 50s,
whose home is the road.
No rights or wrongs about this generation. Nor colours either words that can label. Nor claims or judgements that are completely true. Just a simple outlook on their writings. On their insight. On their lives.
Q u O t E s
Allen Ginsberg: “Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”
Neal Cassady: “My prose has no individual style as such, but is rather an unspoken and still unexpressed groping toward the personal. There is something there that wants to come out; something of my own that must be said. Yet, perhaps, words are not the way for me.”
Jack Kerouac: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
William Burroughs: "Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."
THINGS WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM THE BEAT GENERATION
1. Naked self-expression is the seed of creativity.
2. The artist’s consciousness is expanded by derangement of the senses.
3. Art eludes conventional morality.
