Allen Ginsberg

“Just because I like to suck cock doesn't make me any less American than Jesse Helms.”

“Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”

“So he said, 'What would you like to do? What is your desire really?' I said, 'Doctor, I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends.”

“I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.”

“I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly.God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.”

“Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Spacethrough images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”

“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.”

“We're all golden sunflowers inside.”

“The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.”

“I learned a world from each / one whom I loved”

“Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.”

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”

“The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and handand asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere isholy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's anangel!”

“Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”

“I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.”

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,The earth so dark; so long my sleep,I have become another child.I wake to see the world go wild.”

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

“I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.”

“I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.”

“You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.”