Ken Kesey citáty

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The Paris Review interview (1994)
Kontext: 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.
Jack London had class. He wasn’t a very good writer, but he had tremendous class. And nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way.

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 4
Kontext: This is what I know. The ward is a factory for the Combine. It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse's heart; something that came in all twisted and different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold.

As quoted in "Comes Spake the Cuckoo" the Far Gone interview (13 September 1992) http://www.intrepidtrips.com/kesey/fahey.html by Todd Brendan Fahey http://www.fargonebooks.com/bio.html
Kontext: Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking, 'cause that's where he works. He knows that area of the mind and the brain, and he knows the difference between the two areas. He's a real master at getting your old wheel squeaking again. … When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew that we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it. It is still largely unexplored and uncharted. People like Leary have done the best they can to chart it sort of underground, but the government and the powers do not want this world charted, because it threatens established powers. It always has.

The Paris Review interview (1994)
Kontext: When I see bad-looking bikers with black leather studs on their wrists hanging out at the Oregon Country Fair, I take it as a sign of health. No, I don’t want them hanging around, but trying to eliminate them all, arrest them all, legislate against them all — that’s evil. I have asked feminists, If you could, would you eliminate all male chauvinist pigs? If you could come up with some kind of spray to spray in the air and do away with them, would you? Would you do away with all scorpions and rattlesnakes, mosquitoes? Mosquitoes are part of the ecosystem. So are male chauvinist pigs. You’ve got to fight them, but you don’t try to exterminate them. A purifying group or system that would eliminate them all — that would be an evil force. Anytime you have a force that comes along and says, We will eradicate these people, you have evil. Looking back in history, what has seemed the worst turns out not to be the worst.

The Paris Review interview (1994)
Kontext: It’s the same old wilderness, just no longer up on that hill or around that bend or in the gully. It’s the fact that there is no more hill or gully, that the hollow is there and you’ve got to explore the hollow with faith. If you don’t have faith that there is something down there, pretty soon when you’re in the hollow, you begin to get scared and start shaking. That’s when you stop taking acid and start taking coke and drinking booze and start trying to fill the hollow with depressants and Valium. Real warriors like William Burroughs or Leonard Cohen or Wallace Stevens examine the hollow as well as anybody; they get in there, look far into the dark, and yet come out with poetry.

Varianta: Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.
Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 25
Kontext: While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier... and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"The Art of Fiction" - interview by Robert Faggen, The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994) <!-- p. 92 -->
Kontext: I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. … The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Varianta: He who marches out of line hears another drum.
Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 1

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Zdroj: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest