Ginsberg's Quotes

#1. The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.

David Bowie

#2. Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

Thom Gunn

#3. I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee' ... I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

Robert Rauschenberg

#4. What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

Rita Dove

#5. Names?' the receptionist asked us.
"Jesus," Jamie answered.
"Mary," said Stella.
"Satan," I said as I walked past her and pushed open the door to Ira Ginsberg's office.

Michelle Hodkin

#6. Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Allen Ginsberg

#7. I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.

Anne Waldman

#8. You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there's no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

Allen Ginsberg

#9. Empire State's orange shoulders lifted above the Hell

Allen Ginsberg

#10. I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly.
God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.

Allen Ginsberg

#11. Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Allen Ginsberg

#12. That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this "entity," as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit.

Allen Ginsberg

#13. You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.

Allen Ginsberg

#14. I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

Hunter S. Thompson

#15. Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

Allen Ginsberg

#16. It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Allen Ginsberg

#17. Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.

Ken Kesey

#18. Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

Allen Ginsberg

#19. I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows
/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.

Allen Ginsberg

#20. That's the place where the books are made, I thought. That's also where Allen Ginsberg offered a friend of mine a Fig Newton outside a deli in the East Village. By the time I first came to New York, I was already half in love.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#21. It's time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population.

Allen Ginsberg

#22. They [Nicaragua] haven't had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally?

Allen Ginsberg

#23. It's never to late to do nothing at all.

Allen Ginsberg

#24. The actual materials are important ... A book at the nightstand is important-a light you can get at-or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

Allen Ginsberg

#25. An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography)

Allen Ginsberg

#26. The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!

Allen Ginsberg

#27. My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.

Anne Waldman

#28. I had been up all night with my old friend Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and we had both slid into the abyss of whiskey madness and full-bore substance abuse. It was wonderful,

Hunter S. Thompson

#29. Man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

Scott Ginsberg

#30. It's very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That's exactly what it is.

Allen Ginsberg

#31. I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.

Always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious
but me.

Allen Ginsberg

#32. Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.

Allen Ginsberg

#33. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you.

Allen Ginsberg

#34. Happiness exists I feel it.
I cried for my soul, I cried for the world's soul.
The world has a beautiful soul.

Allen Ginsberg

#35. Shit, Violence, bullets in the brain Unavailing.
We're in too deep to pull out.
Waiting for an orgasm, Mr. Baldwin?
Yes, waiting for an orgasm that's all.

Allen Ginsberg

#36. I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous.

Thom Mayne

#37. Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

Allen Ginsberg

#38. Now the Great Fear's rolled round the world and washes over Newspaper Grey air

Allen Ginsberg

#39. Focus isn't about hammering one nail all our lives.
It's about hammering lots of nails, one way, all our lives.

Scott Ginsberg

#40. (even though, technically, Karanuk's previous publisher was supposed to get an exclusive

Debra Ginsberg

#41. Man's usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. ... Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells

Allen Ginsberg

#42. There's a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N. Y. Times Book Review, who's still chasing Kerouac's corpse with a stiletto.

Allen Ginsberg

#43. I am a more disinterested Ginsberg admirer than Eddie is. Eddie, so to speak, comes to the table with a croupier's rake. He works for the house. He skims from poetry.

Saul Bellow

#44. Alan Ginsberg was fabulous. The man is so filled with energy. He's 65 years old and he's just loaded with energy and charm and wit and his mind is constantly racing.

Ray Manzarek

#45. My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use
my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.

Allen Ginsberg

#46. I shudder, I see the love, I'm doomed, my heart melts again - can't stand not to be in love, can't stand not to be melting with real tenderness, childlike need sweetnesses, that's what's wrong with me.

Allen Ginsberg

#47. To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it's certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing.

Allen Ginsberg

#48. Well, while I'm here I'll do the work - and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

Allen Ginsberg

#49. See, you can't rewrite, 'cause to rewrite is to deceive and lie, and you betray your own thoughts. To rethink the flow and the rhythm, the tumbling out of the words, is a betrayal, and it's a sin, Martin, it's a sin.
Hank (Kerouac)to Martin (Ginsberg) in the film Naked Lunch

David Cronenberg

#50. This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known.

Allen Ginsberg

#51. Like sisters everywhere. With personalities shaped by birth order, we are the keepers of each other's secrets and protectors of each other's childhood memories. We are givers and receivers of female wisdom and are constantly learning from each other.

Debra Ginsberg

#52. Soul identical to each to each ... look in my eyes and speak to yourself, that makes me
everybody's lover

Allen Ginsberg

#53. The bewildering beauty of Paris ...

Allen Ginsberg

#54. What came is gone forever every time

Allen Ginsberg

#55. I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Allen Ginsberg

#56. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

Allen Ginsberg

#57. I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

Allen Ginsberg

#58. I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

Leslie Fiedler

#59. O victory forget you're underwear we're free.

Allen Ginsberg

#60. I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.

Allen Ginsberg

#61. Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That's what I was looking for.

Allen Ginsberg

#62. Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

Allen Ginsberg

#63. But Allison always finished what she started. It was both a saving grace and a tragic flaw.

Debra Ginsberg

#64. The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go.

Allen Ginsberg

#65. The Package is the Product, onomatopoeticized

Allen Ginsberg

#66. YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN

Allen Ginsberg

#67. Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa!

Allen Ginsberg

#68. ...my man world will blow up

Allen Ginsberg

#69. Who'll come lie down in the dark with me
Belly to belly and knee to knee
Who'll look into my hooded eye
Who'll lie down under my darkened thigh?

Allen Ginsberg

#70. I feel my life is sterile, I am unbloomed, unused, I have nothing I can have that I will ever want, only some love, only dearness and tenderness, to make me weep. I am moved now and sad and unhappy beyond cold unhappiness, beyond any inconvenience that will cause you by my affection.

Allen Ginsberg

#71. Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

Allen Ginsberg

#72. We the People - shelling the Vietcong

Allen Ginsberg

#73. The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

Allen Ginsberg

#74. Eat Eat said the sign

Allen Ginsberg

#75. Brainwash cried Romney, the Governor of Pollution

Allen Ginsberg

#76. With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls

Allen Ginsberg

#77. Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]

Allen Ginsberg

#78. I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make.

William S. Burroughs

#79. The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.

Allen Ginsberg

#80. Never apologize for saying what/how you feel. Cuz' that's like saying, "Sorry for being real".

Scott Ginsberg

#81. Everybody's serious but me.

Allen Ginsberg

#82. So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.

Allen Ginsberg

#83. There is something about the aroma of fresh books that's totally intoxicating. A new book has a certain clean, crisp smell full of promise that is difficult to define. Sort of like the scent and feeling of just-washed bed linens at the moment you slide your legs between them.

Debra Ginsberg

#84. Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A million girls vomit and groan
Millions of families hopeless alone

Allen Ginsberg

#85. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.

Allen Ginsberg

#86. Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.

Roger Kimball

#87. In my experience, I've noticed that waiting on tables is one of two things that almost everyone thinks they can do. The other is writing. Perhaps it's no accident that there is only one letter of difference between waiter and writer.

Debra Ginsberg

#88. Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.

Allen Ginsberg

#89. What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It's that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint - a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.

Allen Ginsberg

#90. Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe

Allen Ginsberg

#91. I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.

Allen Ginsberg

#92. Central Intelligence cutting Meo opium fields! China Lobby copping poppies in Burma! How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter-habit

Allen Ginsberg

#93. From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

Allen Ginsberg

#94. Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars

Allen Ginsberg

#95. Electric Networks spread fear of murder on the streets

Allen Ginsberg

#96. America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Allen Ginsberg

#97. I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.

Allen Ginsberg

#98. The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.

Allen Ginsberg

#99. It would almost be easier to have woken up and found that everything about her life was a lie, instead of just this one awful truth.

Debra Ginsberg

#100. enraptured in hypnotic war

Allen Ginsberg