Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes.
No, I didn’t become disenchanted. I just couldn’t paint like them.
These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance 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.
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.
If you’re too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
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.
Invent a new language anyone can understand.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn’t have any money for lawyers.
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.
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.
Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist – if you say you are, you probably aren’t.
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.
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.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
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.
Our government is a bird with two right wings… They’re devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.
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.
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.
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
I think if there’s a great depression there might be some hope.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
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.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
