Quotes by Ginsberg, Allen

"Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!"

Ginsberg, Allen on democracy   

"No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm."

Ginsberg, Allen on drugs
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"Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine, jiggling your knees blankly in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain."

Ginsberg, Allen on drugs
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"It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now."

Ginsberg, Allen on art
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"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."

Ginsberg, Allen on insanity
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"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

Ginsberg, Allen on involvement   

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

Ginsberg, Allen on poetry and poets   

"I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each."

Ginsberg, Allen on poetry and poets   

"Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh."

Ginsberg, Allen on art   

"My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."

Ginsberg, Allen on students