Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes
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If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
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I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.
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Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
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I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.
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To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
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It was a face which darkness could killin an instant
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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.
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Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
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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.
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See it was like this when we waltz into this place. A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-step And I says Dad let's cut but then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really exist Wow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.
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the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.
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It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
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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.
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No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
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We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
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In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.
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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.
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I was the all-American boy, the Eagle Scout. I remember I was at my girlfriend's apartment, and there were these strange publications like The Nation and The New Republic. I started looking at them and thought, 'Gee, this is weird; people saying things against America?' It was an awakening. On the East Coast, I'd never even heard of conscientious objectors.
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Invent a new language anyone can understand.
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Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country.
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There are hardly any left in New York City. The San Francisco Bay Area is very fortunate to still have a lot of independent bookstores.
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Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
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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...
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I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.