Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes
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If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
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Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
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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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We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
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I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."
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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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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.
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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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There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
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Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap
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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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Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
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the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.
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I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
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I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
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Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
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When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.
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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.
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I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
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Today America's on the wrong side of the world revolution. What I mean by that is, the world revolution is the people's revolution, the liberation movements in all the third world countries, which when everyone tries to get started the U.S. stops.
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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.
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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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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.
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Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
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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.
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When I was a boy I was my father.
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I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy
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I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
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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.
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Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
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Kenneth Rexroth Poet -
Richard Brautigan Novelist -
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Neal Cassady Poet -
Philip Whalen Poet -
Charles Bukowski Poet -
William S. Burroughs Novelist -
Robert Creeley Poet -
Walt Whitman Poet -
Lew Welch Poet -
Diane di Prima Poet -
Gregory Corso Poet -
