Thank you for this! I am in an ongoing conversation with a fairly young writer friend who wants to take a year to write a short story. My (unheeded!) advice has been that perhaps writing more and taking risks might serve him better than polishing one story to death. Perhaps he'll listen to Kerouac! I have sent him the quote. Here's a snippet I shared with the same friend on the virtues of quantity over (attempted) quality, and I think it has a good lesson for writers in a similar vein to what Kerouac says: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the 'quantity' group: fifty pound of pots rated an 'A', forty pounds a 'B', and so on. Those being graded on 'quality', however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an 'A'. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay." Via Cool Tools