Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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