Ginsberg Quotes

• Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.

  Ken Kesey

  Warrior, Firsts, Poet

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• Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

  David Amram

  Writing, Literature, World

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• I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

  James Dickey

  Mean, Thinking, Honor

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• Alan Ginsberg was fabulous. The man is so filled with energy. He's 65 years old and he's just loaded with energy and charm and wit and his mind is constantly racing.

  Ray Manzarek

  Men, Years, Racing

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• Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

  Thom Gunn

  Wonderful

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• What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

  Rita Dove

  Twilight, Years, Ironic

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• I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys

  Harvey Pekar

  Book, Guy, Generations

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• Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg.

  Peter Fonda

  Mentor, Bob, Dylan

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• I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Lasts, Facts, Poet

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• Forty million Americans smoked marijuana; the only ones who didn’t like it were Judge Ginsberg, Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton.

  Jay Leno

  Funny, Weed, Marijuana

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• I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.

  Anne Waldman

  Girl, Please, Politically Correct

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• I was photographing the photographer Brassaï. He had very prominent eyes, like a frog's. As I focused my lens, he brought his hand up and pretended to focus his eye. It was a joke, but it added mystery to the picture. There's a sense of action in a very small world. Or with Allen Ginsberg there were people smoking cigarettes and in the smoke there's a sense of motion. It makes much out of very little.

  John Loengard

  Eye, Hands Up, People

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• People keep telling me about the white race and the black race - and it really doesn't make sense. I played Miami, met a fellow two shades darker than me - and his name was Ginsberg! Took my place in two sit-in demonstrations - nobody knew the difference. The he tried for a third lunch counter and blew the whole bit ... asked for blintzes.

  Dick Gregory

  Race, Names, Two

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos.

  Anne Waldman

  School, Ethos, People

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• It's tough to make funny films. And the truth is, with this process, especially if you write your own movie, then you're giving three years of your life to it. And so, I just have to be sure that when I embark on it that I'm happy to think that in three years' time I'm going to be sitting in a room on the tenth floor of an odd office building at Ginsberg Libby talking about it. So I'm keen not to jump into it too quickly and just make sure it's something that I really want.

  Dan Mazer

  Writing, Thinking, Talking

  Source: collider.com

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• My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.

  Anne Waldman

  School, Legacy, Care

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.

  Anne Waldman

  Father, Player, Ethos

  "Interview with Anne Waldman: On All Kinds of Roads". Interview with Kurt Jacobsen, logosjournal.com. 2011.

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• I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

  Gary Snyder

  Years, Vision, Criticism

  "The Beat Vision". Book by Arthur Knight, 1986.

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• I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

  Robert Rauschenberg

  Coffee, Thinking, Hot

  Robert Rauschenberg, Branden W. Joseph (2002). “Robert Rauschenberg”, p.97, MIT Press

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• I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Law, People, Trying

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the F”, p.51, Simon and Schuster

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• See, you can't rewrite, 'cause to rewrite is to deceive and lie, and you betray your own thoughts. To rethink the flow and the rhythm, the tumbling out of the words, is a betrayal, and it's a sin, Martin, it's a sin." --Hank (Kerouac)to Martin (Ginsberg) in the film Naked Lunch

  David Cronenberg

  Betrayal, Lying, Lunch

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• If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction

  Allen Ginsberg

  Essence, Soul, Body

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• [Polythene Pam] was me, remembering a little event with a woman in Jersey, and a man who was England's answer to Allen Ginsberg, who gave us our first exposure - this is so long - you can't deal with all this. You see, everything triggers amazing memories. I met him when we were on tour and he took me back to his apartment and I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did. She didn't wear jackboots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about.

  John Lennon

  Girl, Sex, Memories

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• The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

  Jack Kerouac

  Beautiful, Hipster, Crazy

  Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA

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• Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.

  Reginald Horace Blyth

  Book, School, Expression

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