Source: Demian (1919), p. 9 Prologue
Context: I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Each man's life represents the road toward himself, and attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that — one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can.
Micko
@Micko, member from June 4, 2020“You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.”
Source: Demian (1919), p. 94
Context: You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy. But there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
Context: I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
No source in Hemingway's works has been found. May have originated in a 2000 post to the Usenet group alt.support.depression. link https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.support.depression/wYH4aCNHyp4/_d50yuXTeHsJ
Disputed
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Variant: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
“There's nothing wrong with being incompetent.… It just means you don't have to do as much.”
NBC interview (1987)
“I'm writing this book because we're all going to die”
In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid...
Visions of Cody (1960)
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”
The Dharma Bums (1958)
The Town and the City (1950)
Context: He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.
Not a Kerouac quote, but by Jon Krakauer, from his nonfiction book Into the Wild (1996).
Misattributed
Source: On the Road
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
This is not a quote by Kerouac. It's a quote by CBS broadcaster Charles Kuralt who used to present a TV news segment called 'On the Road' (which is probably how the confusion arose). This particular statement by Kuralt was made in May 1996 to students of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19960527&id=yf8yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yQcGAAAAIBAJ&pg=3106,5606314
Misattributed
“The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view.”
Misattributed
Source: Often attributed to Kerouac's On the Road, the quote cannot be found in that book, nor in any of Kerouac's other published works.