Top 100 Quotes About Allen Ginsberg: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Allen Ginsberg

#1. 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

#2. My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

Patti Smith

#3. Ed Friedman: [talking about Patti Smith] One time she told me, "Allen Ginsberg thought I was a cute boy and he tried to pick me up, so I said, "LOOK AT THE TITS, ALLEN! NOTICE THE TITS!

Legs McNeil

#4. Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

David Amram

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

Ken Kesey

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.

Lynne Tillman

#11. Of course, there are some people who behave rudely. Allen Ginsberg used to like to get up in public and take his clothes off. I don't do that, but I liked Allen Ginsberg. He was a nice guy.

Sam Hamill

#12. 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

#13. Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet.

Charles Bukowski

#14. [Allen] Ginsberg totally helped that out. He was the best sales person. He was the most pop. They are still shocking and relevant, especially [William] Burroughs.

Yony Leyser

#15. If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction

Allen Ginsberg

#16. Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

Patti Smith

#17. 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

#18. Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#19. I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.

Harvey Pekar

#20. My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.

Anne Waldman

#21. Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg.

Peter Fonda

#22. Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn't worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

Christopher Bram

#23. 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

#24. Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.
Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

Maxine Hong Kingston

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

Allen Ginsberg

#26. Brainwash cried Romney, the Governor of Pollution

Allen Ginsberg

#27. Eat Eat said the sign

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#29. We the People - shelling the Vietcong

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#35. YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN

Allen Ginsberg

#36. The bewildering beauty of Paris ...

Allen Ginsberg

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#45. What came is gone forever every time

Allen Ginsberg

#46. The Package is the Product, onomatopoeticized

Allen Ginsberg

#47. enraptured in hypnotic war

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#49. 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

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

Allen Ginsberg

#62. To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

Allen Ginsberg

#63. America this is quite serious

Allen Ginsberg

#64. 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

#65. Scream in despair over Meat and Metal Microphone

Allen Ginsberg

#66. The madman bum and angel beat in time with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years

Allen Ginsberg

#67. May no Evil Eye peek thru window, keyhole or gunsight at his white haired face!

Allen Ginsberg

#68. Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.

Allen Ginsberg

#69. Everybody's serious but me.

Allen Ginsberg

#70. Clock hands move noonward

Allen Ginsberg

#71. Scientist alone is true poet.

Allen Ginsberg

#72. senseless, senseless coughs of emotion

Allen Ginsberg

#73. What is obscenity? And to whom?

Allen Ginsberg

#74. A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

Allen Ginsberg

#75. We're all golden sunflowers inside.

Allen Ginsberg

#76. Artificial trees, robot sofas,
Ignorant cars-
One Way Street to Heaven

Allen Ginsberg

#77. Our heads are round so thought can change direction

Allen Ginsberg

#78. Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Allen Ginsberg

#79. I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#81. Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.

Allen Ginsberg

#82. Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.

Allen Ginsberg

#83. Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.

Allen Ginsberg

#84. 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

#85. Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.

Allen Ginsberg

#86. I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense.

Allen Ginsberg

#87. To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.

Allen Ginsberg

#88. Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.

Allen Ginsberg