Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

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

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

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

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.

Make your mind learn its way around the heart.

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.

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

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

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

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Invent a new language anyone can understand.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.