Top 100 Quotes About Ginsberg
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.
Patti Smith
#7. Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
Thom Gunn
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.
Ken Kesey
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.
Christopher Bram
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. [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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#27. 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
#28. I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
James Dickey
#29. I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
Harvey Pekar
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Ms. Ginsberg. I wonder if you can help me. I have a legal question," Felicity Mason said. Great. I hated giving out free legal advice at parties, but at that moment, I would have drafted her will in crayon on a cocktail napkin to get away from Cole.
N.M. Silber
#33. 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
#34. Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg.
Peter Fonda
#35. Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, 'We'll get you through your children!' For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true.
Roger Kimball
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Forty million Americans smoked marijuana; the only ones who didn't like it were Judge Ginsberg, Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton.
Jay Leno
#40. With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls
Allen Ginsberg
#43. The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!
Allen Ginsberg
#45. Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?
Allen Ginsberg
#46. 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
#47. 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
#49. Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa!
Allen Ginsberg
#52. 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
#53. But Allison always finished what she started. It was both a saving grace and a tragic flaw.
Debra Ginsberg
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.
Allen Ginsberg
#58. I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.
Allen Ginsberg
#59. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
Allen Ginsberg
#60. I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
Allen Ginsberg
#64. 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
#65. The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.
Allen Ginsberg
#66. 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
#68. Electric Networks spread fear of murder on the streets
Allen Ginsberg
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe
Allen Ginsberg
#74. Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]
Allen Ginsberg
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
Allen Ginsberg
#80. 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
#81. To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.
Allen Ginsberg
#82. There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation . . . You shouldn't feel like you have to play . . . you don't owe anyone anything. You don't have to be available to everyone. You can stop.
Scaachi Koul
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. May no Evil Eye peek thru window, keyhole or gunsight at his white haired face!
Allen Ginsberg
#88. Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.
Allen Ginsberg
#94. A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.
Allen Ginsberg
#96. Artificial trees, robot sofas,
Ignorant cars-
One Way Street to Heaven
Allen Ginsberg
#97. Our heads are round so thought can change direction
Allen Ginsberg
#98. Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Allen Ginsberg
#99. I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.
Allen Ginsberg
#100. Never apologize for saying what/how you feel. Cuz' that's like saying, "Sorry for being real".
Scott Ginsberg
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