Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes
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I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
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Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
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Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace' One grand boulevard with trees with one grand cafe in sun with strong black coffee in very small cups. One not necessarily very beautiful man or woman who loves you. One fine day.
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I don't think our Beat Generation would even be known as that, had it not been for Ginsberg. You might say he put that whole concept together. Without it, we might have been known, but only as individuals. Separate, great writers, scattered across the landscape.
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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.
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I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
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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.
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We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
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We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
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They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
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I guess we all could have been put in jail for that. Do you think the statute of limitations has expired?
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When I was a boy I was my father.
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I greet you at the beginning of a great career.
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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.
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Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.
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Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.
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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.
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I have a feeling I'm falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can't help it if the ground itself is falling.
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A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
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These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
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Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
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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.
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My country tears of thee.
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I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder