"I'm looking for the binding energy of a look a crop of reflections to be reaped in a winter of thorn when icebergs of illusion will melt to be served at high tea and the spaces between the poles pinned down"

"The stars are dreaming but they are laughing I see myself in the smile of a polar bear while turning the pages of an arctic sky reading the delirious lines that foretell the sovereignty of language and the rule of invisible birds"

"She is one of the best literary editors in the country and is why City Lights Books has grown and done well."

"He found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the gothic castle — a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed."

"We're still in a state of shock … We have our "Dump Bush and Cheney" sign in the window, which Lawrence [Ferlinghetti] painted himself. We're looking forward to impeachment or perhaps, indictments for war crimes."

"The mood of the '50s is like today."

"During the '70s, when the Cold War was still on, we invited Voznesensky and Yevtushenko to come here. We had very large readings for them. It was a way of kind of culturally thawing the Cold War."

"Then (in 1981) we did a book by Geoffrey Rips called "Unamerican Activities," which was a documentation of the subversion of the underground press. That was when the Freedom of Information Act made those files available. We were shocked, we couldn't believe that our government had been bombing people, infiltrating their organizations. In fact, I think one of the files listed Lawrence as a "beatnik rabble-rouser.""