All Quotes

"If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead."

"In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."

"Salvador Dali seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door."

"Like the majority of deaf people, I don't like blind people much."

"I like go to bed and get up early; in that, I am anti-Spanish."

"A paranoiac is like a poet, born, not made. (Un paranoico como un poeta, nace, no se hace)"

"The story is also a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetic. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form its substance. (The golden age)"

"Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

"I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial—largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox—in other words,—all the things I love the most."

"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."

"The tempest unleashes an alphabet letters fall through the apertures of crazy angles to spell out the future uprooting the course of invention and enslaving the masters"

"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"

"Lawrence is usually the first poet kids read in schools that they really like. It's a real turn-on for them."

"We have one called Commodity Aesthetics, which is our section on popular culture."

"The most important of the beat poets. He was a really true poet with an original voice, probably the most lyrical of those poets."

"The old San Francisco is under attack to the point where it's disappearing"

"Maybe a thousand dollars"

"When I joined City Lights in 1971 and started working with Lawrence, it was clear that it had been very much a center of protest, for people with revolutionary ideas and people who wanted to change society. And when I first began working at the little editorial office up on Filbert and Grant, people that Lawrence had known through the whole decade of the '60s were dropping in all the time, like Paul Krassner, Tim Leary, people who were working with underground presses and trying to provide an alternative to mainstream media. This was a period of persecution, and FBI infiltration of those presses."

"Ginsberg used to stay in the publishing house. Our editorial office had two rooms and a kitchen; it was a tiny place. And one of the rooms was kind of a guest room so that visiting authors could stay there. Allen would come sometimes for a week at a time or more. And he hung out in the store, also. The store had become quite a center for writers by that time. Ginsberg was working on "The Fall of America," which was his long chronicle of the Vietnam War, which is full of the anguish and passion and anger that so many people felt. The war had been going on for such a long time by then. That book won the National Book Award [in 1974]."

"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.""

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

"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."

"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."

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

"[Footnote] Great men seem to have only one purpose in life — getting into history. That may be all they are good for."

"They [the Pilgrim Fathers] believed in freedom of thought for themselves and for all other people who believed exactly as they did."

"If the Pilgrims were looking for freedom of conscience, they came to just the right place. In America, everybody's conscience is unusually free."

"The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes."

"Armadillos make affectionate pets, if you need affection that much."

"Sartor Resartus is simply unreadable, and for me that always sort of spoils a book."

"If I were king of radio, mighty monarch of the air lanes, I would make Will Cuppy the master of ceremonies on all programs, because he has the nonchalance and grace of the genuine man-about-town. His quips are as fresh as traffic cops and his delivery leaves this corner as happy as a comedian who has just found a sponsor."

"He had the haunted look of the true humorist."

"His style of humor is unique and, like the taste of an avocado, a little hard to describe."

"He was probably the most diligent fact excavator since Gibbon; what he didn't know about a subject, once he had decided to spoof it, wasn't worth knowing."

"A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven."

"We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!"

"Principles You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction."

"I had too much stuff. My machines came from too far away."

"The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things."

"In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization."

"Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure — the adventure into the unknown, an unknown which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored; the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered; the attitude that all is uncertain; to summarize it — the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics — the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual — the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one's heart to follow an idea. If people are going back to religion, what are they going back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who doubts God — more, one who disbelieves in God? Is the modern church a place to give comfort and encouragement to the value of such doubts? So far, have we not drawn strength and comfort to maintain the one or the other of these consistent heritages in a way which attacks the values of the other? Is this unavoidable? How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time?"

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."

"The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.Pure mathematics is just such an abstraction from the real world, and pure mathematics does have a special precise language for dealing with its own special and technical subjects. But this precise language is not precise in any sense if you deal with real objects of the world, and it is only pedantic and quite confusing to use it unless there are some special subtleties which have to be carefully distinguished."

"This is all very confusing, especially when we consider that even though we may consistently consider ourselves to be the outside observer when we look at the rest of the world, the rest of the world is at the same time observing us, and that often we agree on what we see in each other. Does this then mean that my observations become real only when I observe an observer observing something as it happens? This is a horrible viewpoint. Do you seriously entertain the idea that without the observer there is no reality? Which observer? Any observer? Is a fly an observer? Is a star an observer? Was there no reality in the universe before 109 B.C. when life began? Or are you the observer? Then there is no reality to the world after you are dead? I know a number of otherwise respectable physicists who have bought life insurance."

"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize."

"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work."

"The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it is in another direction — a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory — who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself."

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

"I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it."