Ken Kesey Quotes

I was raised a Christian and was a stone-faced acid head.

There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Of offering more than what I can deliver, I have a bad habit, it is true. But I have to offer more than I can deliver, To be able to deliver what I do.

The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it.

The Republican consciousness has no integrity and it falls apart once you check it out. If you're a Christian, why would you want to fry this dude?

This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.

I've been to too many Dead concerts. There've been smokin' holes where my memory used to be.

Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.

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.

Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that's in your audience's eye.

He knows that 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.

There's shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away.

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.

I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary."

They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

Your trouble is, you keep trying to unscrew the unscrutable.

Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.

What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait.

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

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.

Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys.

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all

I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!

But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.

Now, you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

I believe that a man should be... as big as he feels it in him to be!

The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.

That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.

The frontiers we broke into in the '60s are still largely unexplored.

The best of all possible cages.' Ben stepped back to regard the job with a sad smile. 'What more can one ask?

I don't think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.

Things you think you're saying for the first time ever, have been said better before by Shakespeare, though they may need saying again.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see.

He knows that there's no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who's trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you're not bothered.

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

More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face.

Don't say it...I've seen too many loves sundered by too much needless honesty.

The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself