Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My country tears of thee.
When I was a boy I was my father.
Invent a new language anyone can understand.
Make your mind learn its way around the heart.
If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap
It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.
I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy
For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.
Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.
When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.
A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.
In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of 'suffering humanity
I have a feeling I'm falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can't help it if the ground itself is falling.
The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.