Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.Collection: Hope
Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.Collection: Government
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.Collection: Freedom
It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.
These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.
Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.
I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonderCollection: Forever
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.Collection: Heart
Make your mind learn its way around the heart.Collection: Heart
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.Collection: World
If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.Collection: Funny
I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.Collection: Waiting
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.Collection: Distance
Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.Collection: Government
I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."Collection: Art
If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.Collection: Believe
If you're going to be a writer you should sit down and write in the morning, and keep it up all day, every day. Charles Bukowski, no matter how drunk he got the night before or no matter how hungover he was, the next morning he was at his typewriter. Every morning. Holidays, too. He'd have a bottle of whiskey with him to wake up with, and that's what he believed. That's the way you became a writer: by writing. When you weren't writing, you weren't a writer.Collection: Morning
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.Collection: Reading
The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.Collection: Art
Invent a new language anyone can understand.Collection: Language
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.Collection: Bird
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.Collection: Buddhist
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half so bad if it isn't you.Collection: Life
As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.Collection: Tails
Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it.Collection: Doors
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.Collection: Imagination
Today America's on the wrong side of the world revolution. What I mean by that is, the world revolution is the people's revolution, the liberation movements in all the third world countries, which when everyone tries to get started the U.S. stops.Collection: Country
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.Collection: Bridges
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.Collection: Bows
Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.Collection: Mean
I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shockingCollection: Angel
You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.Collection: Book
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchyCollection: War