Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
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.
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.
You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.
I am 23, the year of the iron birthday, the gate of darkness. I am ill.
The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.
