Quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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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.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
Before I was at Nagasaki, I was a good American boy. I was an Eagle Scout; I was the commander of a sub-chaser in the Normandy Invasion.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
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.
We didn't really have a stable. One at a time, poets would stagger in the door, drunk or sober, high or stoned.
Some of our greatest painters and poets are not activists at all. Like the Japanese haiku masters, or various Polish poets or Chinese poets, or 12th century mystics like Rumi or Hafiz, the great Persian poets.
It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
It seemed the clamor was such that this book would not be allowed by proper society. After all, Howl was a vast castigation of American consumer society.
There won't be any changes until we have another depression like in the 1930s, which we have not approached yet in the present recession.
"Skyscraper America" extends around the world with American corporate monoculture.
Under both Bush administrations, they've reappointed at least four felons who were convicted during the Watergate years and during Iran-Contra.
No, it's much worse. That was nothing back then. President Eisenhower's reign was very stultifying; there was lots of unspoken censorship.
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'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.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.
I had a show at George Krevsky Gallery this past spring. That show traveled to Woodstock, New York where it showed for six weeks.
The famous non-objective artists, from the New York School, for instance - Kline, De Kooning, Motherwell - were Abstract Expressionists, but they were great draftsmen; they could draw extremely well before they started painting non-objective.
It seems to me it's changing for the worse. The spineless Democrats are taking dictation from George II who usurped the throne and is occupying the palace illegally.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
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.
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