126 Quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I greet you at the beginning of a great career,

I had a show at George Krevsky Gallery this past spring. That show traveled to Woodstock, New York where it showed for six weeks.

I don't think our Beat Generation would even be known as that, had it not been for Ginsberg. You might say he put that whole concept together. Without it, we might have been known, but only as individuals. Separate, great writers, scattered across the landscape.

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

There are hardly any left in New York City. The San Francisco Bay Area is very fortunate to still have a lot of independent bookstores.

There won't be any changes until we have another depression like in the 1930s, which we have not approached yet in the present recession.

I guess we all could have been put in jail for that. Do you think the statute of limitations has expired?

You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.

Communism wasn't a word that I thought of when I went to Cuba. The original Fidelistas were not Communists. They were graduate students at the university and law students. After the Fidelistas took over, they went to Washington and tried to get support from the U.S. government, which turned them down. They were in a desperate political and economic situation, so they took the offer from the Soviet Union. Communism was a matter of necessity.