Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes
"No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Money, Lawyers)
"We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Change, Consciousness, Poets, World)
"They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Fact)
"These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Democrats, Nothing)
"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."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: People, Effort, May, Painting)
"Southern California, where the American Dream came too true."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Dream, American)
"I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: God, American, Waiting)
"I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Hope, Depression)
"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."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Automobiles)
"I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Brooks, Reading)
"It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"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."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Power, American, Europe)
"The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Money, Editors, Literary)
"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."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Time, Books)
"Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Culture, Today)
"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."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Death, Absurdity)
"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."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Government, Bombs, states, United)
"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."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: War, Women, Thought, Angels, Old, Population, Washington)
"Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Freedom, Speech, World)