Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes (31 Quotes)

I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

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

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

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

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.

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

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.

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

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

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.