Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“See it was like this when we waltz into this place.A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-stepAnd I says Dad let's cutbut then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really existWow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.”

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

“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.”

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

“We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“[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.”

“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.”

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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