Wit & Attitude Quote by Ken Kesey

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

Ken Kesey, Author

About this Quote

Shakespeare, in Kesey's telling, isn’t a marble bust but a working playwright with sawdust in his hair. The line rejects the museum idea of literature: text as inert artifact, preserved for reverent scanning. Kesey’s verb choice - “lie” versus “get up and move around” - turns the page into a corpse and performance into resuscitation. It’s a provocation aimed at readers who treat “great books” like homework and at writers who mistake polish for life.

The intent is practical and a little insurgent. Kesey came up in an America where the novel was becoming an object of prestige (MFA workshops, New Criticism, the book-as-sacred-text), even as he was pushing toward communal, sensory experience: the Merry Pranksters, the Acid Tests, a culture that wanted art to happen to you. He invokes Shakespeare as a kind of alibi for disorder and immediacy: if the canonical genius wrote for bodies in a room, then liveliness isn’t anti-literary; it’s the original job description.

The subtext is also a critique of control. What “moves around” can’t be fully owned: a play changes with actors, audiences, time, and mood. Kesey is quietly arguing that meaning is not sealed inside prose; it’s negotiated in the air between people. It’s an invitation to unfreeze literature - to treat language as action, not merchandise - and a reminder that the most “classic” art was once rowdy, public, and built to survive contact with real life.

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Topic	Writing
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About the Author

Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey (September 17, 1935 - November 10, 2001) was a Author from USA.

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