Buddhists From The United States

"When I wasn't sure what the word "charisma" meant, I met Steve Jobs, and then I knew."

"He wanted you to be great, and he wanted you to create something that was great, and he was going to make you do that."

"Bill Gates: Jobs was a genius, what he did, particularly when he came back to Apple... no one else could do what he did there. I couldn’t have done that. He was such a wizard at over-motivating people — I was a minor wizard so I couldn’t fall under his spell — but I could see him casting the spell. I was so jealous."

"Jobs was a practicing Buddhist and his computers are directly inspired by Tibetan Buddhist dialectics."

"If only I had the magic self of babyhood when I remembered what it was like before I was born, I wouldn't worry about death now knowing both to be the same empty dream."

"And we know that everything is going to be okay. All we need is Kerouac and a glass of sweet tea."

"He did more in one lifetime than most people do in ten."

"We will write a postcard To our friends and family In free verse On the road with Kerouac Sheltered in his Bivouac On this road we'll never die..."

"Did the tea-time of your soul Make you long for wilder days Did you never let Jack Kerouac Wash over you in waves?"

"Certainly I've read The Subterranean: all his crap for that matter. The man is an ass, a mystic boob with intellectual myopia."

"I notice that there's a long gap in your job history and it said for 22 years you went Kerouac on everyone's ass?"

"Images of cars and highways fill our literature, songs, movies and art, not just in America but worldwide. Books like "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac or "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe were among the first to romanticize driving and road trips. Old blues and early rock songs like "Route 66," "Brand New Cadillac," and "Goin' Mobile" further romanticized cars and highways for the postwar "Baby Boom" generation. Thousands of films and T.V. shows have focused on or predominantly featured cars and car chases: "Rebel Without a Cause," "American Graffiti," "Easy Rider," "Bullet," "The Dukes of Hazzard," the "James Bond" films, and at least half a dozen Burt Reynolds movies. The list goes on... All this pop culture, combined with relentless commercial advertising, has made cars an integral part of our personal identity. We have been taught to equate motor vehicles with wealth, power, romance, rebellion and freedom. Now, everywhere I go in the world, I see cars-millions and millions of cars-in Rome, Guatemala City, Kuala Lumpur, Bombay and Beijing. Everywhere there are huge traffic jams and poor air quality. The number of motor vehicles in the world is growing three times faster than the population."

"The fifties were supposed to be a golden age when the pig had everything his way. That's what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal?"

"Ken Kesey wore a Mexican serape and said Jack/Kerouac got trapped in his "own little/box"-that was his downfall. Can we really say/anyone who changed so many lives/had a downfall?/He just drank too much alcohol and had a shorter life/than he might have had./Jack's box was pretty vast."

"Kerouac was "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle" in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence, ... the intellective void ... the spiritual drabness."

"The world that [Kerouac] trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one."

"If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road — that's what I wanted in my own work."

"Texas in the summer is cool We'll be on the road like Jack Kerouac, lookin' back Sam, you're ready, let's go anywhere Get the car packed and throw me the key Run away with me"

"Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious. Psychologically, he was a mess—as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac lacked the knack of sanctifying his pathologies and inducing others to bow down in obeisance."

"Kerouac had lots of class — stumbling drunk in the end, but read those last books. He never blames anybody else; he always blames himself. If there is a bad guy, it's poor old drunk Jack, stumbling around. You never hear him railing at the government or railing at this or that. He likes trains, people, bums, cars. He just paints a wonderful picture of Norman Rockwell's world. Of course it's Norman Rockwell on a lot of dope."

"You're not punk, and I'm telling everyone. Save your breath, I never was one. You don't know what I'm all about Like killing cops and reading Kerouac"

"Kerouac was a true American original, in the direct line of men like Jack London and Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and Norman Mailer; men not of exquisite European sensibility or tragic Russian depths but of enormous American appetite; men who understood appetite in their brains and in their balls and in their inflamed nerve endings; in their wet dreams and egalitarian surroundings, and in their amazing grasp of the raw sweep of this country; men who not only understood appetite, but also that appetite was what America was all about, and that America, like most of them, would die forever young."

"Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, "Walking on water wasn't built in a day." Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."

"Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I've spent away from my family and loved ones, I'm starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There's a darkness inside of me that I'm only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it's starting to scare me."

"If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes — his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life."

"I pulled On The Road off the shelf and found myself reading it between classes, and at that time in my life it was exactly what I craved, exactly what I needed to hear. I thought, "That's the way, that's the ideal life, that's great. You get in a car and you drive and you see your friends and you end up in a city for a night and you go out drinking and you catch up and you share these really intense experiences. And then you're on the road and you're doing it again." The romance of the road, particularly from Kerouac's work, encapsulated how I wanted to live. I found a way to do it by being a musician, which is what I always wanted to be. The traveling and the being on tour and being away from home set a precedent for me where I thought, "Oh yeah, this is how it works." But then in reading Big Sur, it's the end of the road. You end up with a series of failed relationships and you end up being an alcoholic and in your late 30s, and not having any kind of real grip on the lives of the people around you. That's the potential other end of the spectrum when you're never tied to anybody or anything. I run the risk of losing touch with the people in my life that mean the most to me because I have made the decision to live like this."

"Some times feeling like Holden Caulfield, sometimes Jack Kerouac"

"Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language."

"I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."

"That's not writing. It's typing."

"Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we'd have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen. Kerouac understood long before I did. Life is a dream, he said."

"Caringosity killed the Kerouac cat. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction."

"I consider On The Road sort of holy because it helped change my life as it did to so many others and as it continues to do so. Jack wanted his papers enshrined in a library but they are now in the hands of highly non-literary people more interested in their monetary value than in their literary or cultural value."

"Defy the law! – Write the heartbroken poetry of the World!"

"I have the right ideas, but my words are too ... complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won't get lost in the dark when they see and hear them. I want them to shine like beacons of light in a world of overly complicated darkness. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

"There are worse things than being mad."

"A man needs truth like a machine needs oil."

"The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view."

"It's not that I can't fall in love. It's really that I can't help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can't distinguish between what's platonic and what isn't, because it's all too much and not enough at the same time."

"If you own a rug you own too much."

"Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest."

"I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility."

"If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime."

"Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink."

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."

"Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain."

"Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple."

"My witness is the empty sky."