I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.

Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace’One grand boulevard with treeswith one grand cafe in sunwith strong black coffee in very small cups.One not necessarily very beautifulman or woman who loves you.One fine day.

I’m reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

The world is a beautiful placeto be born intoif you don’t mind happinessnot always beingso very much funif you don’t mind a touch of hellnow and thenjust when everything is finebecause even in heaventhey don’t...

It’s the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

[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.

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.

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

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all ‘bottom line’ editors; everything depends on the money.

I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

I am awaitingperpetually and forevera renaissance of wonder

They were looking for a stable, but we didn’t have one. In fact, we weren’t very stable ourselves.

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn’t have any money for lawyers.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Well, I didn’t know how to draw very well back then, in the ’40s and ’50s.

Fuck Art, let’s Dance!

And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

I too have drunk and seenthe spider

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

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.

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

Don’t bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

I think if there’s a great depression there might be some hope.

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.

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

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,and whose shepherds mislead them.Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.Pity the nation that raises not its voice,except to praise...

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

No, I didn’t become disenchanted. I just couldn’t paint like them.

I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say’whom I amconstantly shocking

I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.

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

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.

See it was like this when we waltz into this place.A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-stepAnd I says Dad let’s cutbut then this dame comes up behind me see and says...

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.

These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.