Nothing like the road to rub all the sand out of your soul.

- John Clellon Holmes

Jazz music hashaunted America for seventy years.It has tempted us out of our lily-white reserve with its black promise of untrammeled joy.

- John Clellon Holmes

Certain kinds of clichés are the narcotics of the middle class.

- John Clellon Holmes

But all I could think of was taking some books to read in jail. I held everybody up, choosing which ones to take.

- John Clellon Holmes

The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.

- John Clellon Holmes

Some books accrete things to themselves like a magnet. The writer risks sterility by subjecting the mysterious power of imagination to the devices of…

- John Clellon Holmes

The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked.

- John Clellon Holmes