Top 73 Quotes & Sayings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
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.
No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
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.
It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
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.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.
Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.
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.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
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.
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.
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'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.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
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.
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy
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.
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.
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.
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.
Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
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.
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 am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
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.
I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking
Poetry can change the world, just like any art can change the world, by changing consciousness. Of course this was the great slogan of the nineteen sixites hippies’ revolution—enlarge the area of consciousness, which quite often was done by psychedelic means.
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.
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 am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
Invent a new language anyone can understand.
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."
If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
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.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.
As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.
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.
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
My country tears of thee.
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.
Make your mind learn its way around the heart.
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.
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