329 Quotes by Ken Kesey

It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down to your hips. Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

Each little flake that comes off of it, I can remember the period that flake came from.

I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.

It's been totally successful. Of course, we don't keep any records, so how do we know,

Luckily, I remembered something Malcolm Cowley had taught us at Stanford - perhaps the most important lesson a writing class (not a writer, understand, but a class) can ever learn. 'Be gentle with one another's efforts,' he often admonished us. 'Be kind and considerate with your criticism. Always remember that it's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.'

If Shakespeare were working right now, he wouldn't be working with a quill pen. He would be working with whatever the cutting edge of theatrical drama would be. And this is where literature is headed.

They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.

You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become almost impossible for someone to "go mad" in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently "went mad" and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard.

Then—as he was talking—a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do...