Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotations

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

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.

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

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

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

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.

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 have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

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.

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.

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.

No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.

These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.

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.

They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.

Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career,

I had a show at George Krevsky Gallery this past spring. That show traveled to Woodstock, New York where it showed for six weeks.

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.

... there is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

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.

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.

I guess we all could have been put in jail for that. Do you think the statute of limitations has expired?

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.

Communism wasn't a word that I thought of when I went to Cuba. The original Fidelistas were not Communists. They were graduate students at the university and law students. After the Fidelistas took over, they went to Washington and tried to get support from the U.S. government, which turned them down. They were in a desperate political and economic situation, so they took the offer from the Soviet Union. Communism was a matter of necessity.

Make your mind learn its way around the heart.

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

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.

As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.

I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.

I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking

When I was a boy I was my father.

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.

My country tears of thee.

A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

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.

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.

the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

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.

In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of 'suffering humanity

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.

There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.

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.

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

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...

Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap

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.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

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.

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.

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.

Invent a new language anyone can understand.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

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.

I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.

Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.