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.
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.
I’m reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all ‘bottom line’ editors; everything depends on the money.
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.
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.
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.
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
When you’re young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.
Don’t bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
I think if there’s a great depression there might be some hope.
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.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
Well, I didn’t know how to draw very well back then, in the ’40s and ’50s.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
My country tears of thee.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn’t have one. In fact, we weren’t very stable ourselves.
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.