Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn’t have any money for lawyers.
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.
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
When I was a boy I was my father.
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy.
As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.
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.
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.
For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
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.
A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
Make your mind learn its way around the heart.
Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn.
Think long thoughts in short sentences.
The best writing is what’s right in front of you. Sometimes I’d walk down the street with poets and they wouldn’t see anything. I’d have to shake their arm and say, ‘Look! Look!
Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.
Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained.
You and me could really exist.
I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale.