Quotes from Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

[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.

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.

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

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

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

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