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.

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

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

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

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Make your mind learn its way around the heart.

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.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

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

Invent a new language anyone can understand.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

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.

My country tears of thee.

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

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

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

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

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

[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.

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

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

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.

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

When I was a boy I was my father.

I am awaitingperpetually and forevera renaissance of wonder

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