Ginsberg quotes:

Send

Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg. -- Peter Fonda
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. -- Thom Gunn
Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second. -- Ken Kesey
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
I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys -- Harvey Pekar
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I think Allen [Ginsberg] was a person who's like a child. -- Ai Weiwei
I never saw [Allen Ginsberg] as some kind of crazy figure. -- Ai Weiwei
My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg. -- Patti Smith
Allen Ginsberg was a remarkable guy. He was himself. He was an original. -- Nat Hentoff
I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me. -- Ai Weiwei
Forty million Americans smoked marijuana; the only ones who didn't like it were Judge Ginsberg, Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton. -- Jay Leno
Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys. -- Harvey Pekar
I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make. -- William S. Burroughs
I have lots of things that aren't so old that I value, such as a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which he signed for me. -- Stephen Greenblatt
Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that. -- Lynne Tillman
[Allen] Ginsberg totally helped that out. He was the best sales person. He was the most pop. They are still shocking and relevant, especially [William] Burroughs. -- Yony Leyser
I saw [Allen Ginsberg] more as an old man who liked poetry and who had a lot of physical and emotional problems. We liked our time together. -- Ai Weiwei
Of course, there are some people who behave rudely. Allen Ginsberg used to like to get up in public and take his clothes off. I don't do that, but I liked Allen Ginsberg. He was a nice guy. -- Sam Hamill
Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet. -- Charles Bukowski
Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does. -- Maxine Hong Kingston
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

Send