Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes
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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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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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We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size.
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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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T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
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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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Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
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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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I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
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Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
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We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
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I greet you at the beginning of a great career.
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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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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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... there is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
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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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I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
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I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
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Make your mind learn its way around the heart.
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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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Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.
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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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When I was a boy I was my father.
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My country tears of thee.