Lawrence Ferlinghetti famous quotes

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Heart #Poetry #Graffiti

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

#Funny #Witty #Fall

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Distance #Men #Naked

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

#Reading #Our Generation #Boredom

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Wire #Rhyming #Poet

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

#Waiting #Sound #Wonder

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

#Government #Wings #Two

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Dark #Government #Saws

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Book #Independent #Ties

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

#Depression #Thinking #Might

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Imagination #Poetry #Shadow

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

#Bows #Critics #Masterpiece

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Nice #Ideas #Generations

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Dream #Usa #California

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

#Freedom Of Speech #World #Fascists

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

#Beauty #Waiting #Leap

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
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#People #Humanity #World

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

#Bird #Worms #Spite

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Doe #Relevance

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...
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Doors #Long #World

A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Believe #Fantasy #Wonder

My country tears of thee.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Country #America #Tears

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#People #Effort #Lazy

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

#Wire #Poet #Climbs

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Beautiful #Strong #Coffee

[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Memories #Fall #Eye

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Morning #Writing #Holiday

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

#World #States

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

#Bookstores #Rooms #Lawyer

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

#Book #Reading #Lasts

I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Angel #Feels

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Country #Creative

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

#Inspirational #Retirement #Soldier

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Art #Communication #Painting

Invent a new language anyone can understand.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Language #Creation

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Forever #Renaissance #Wonder

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Couple #Dad #Hate

I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#War #Waiting #World

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

#Bridges #Brooklyn #World

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

#Real #Editors #Lines

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#New York #Real #Book

As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Tails #Mouths #Perceive

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Fall #Feet #Feelings

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

#Opposites #Culture #Today

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

#Wells #Draws

They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Alaska #Facts

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Life #Beautiful #People

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Easier #Visuals

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

#World #Way #Consciousness

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#New York #Lying #Bigs

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.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Cities #Long #Fads

I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#Cities #San Francisco #World