Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

Make your mind learn its way around the heart.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.

If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

If you're going to be a writer you should sit down and write in the morning, and keep it up all day, every day. Charles Bukowski, no matter how drunk he got the night before or no matter how hungover he was, the next morning he was at his typewriter. Every morning. Holidays, too. He'd have a bottle of whiskey with him to wake up with, and that's what he believed. That's the way you became a writer: by writing. When you weren't writing, you weren't a writer.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

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.

Invent a new language anyone can understand.

There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.

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.

Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it.

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Today America's on the wrong side of the world revolution. What I mean by that is, the world revolution is the people's revolution, the liberation movements in all the third world countries, which when everyone tries to get started the U.S. stops.