AustLit

''The only people for me,' Jack Kerouac wrote in his autobiographical novel On the Road, 'are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles...' I read this, now legendary, sentence some years ago and was struck by how precisely Kerouac summed up my own writerly obsessions.' (Publication abstract)