Quotes from Allen Ginsberg

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.

The stereotype is that a poet shoots his load at 25 years old and goes around the rest of his life doddering.

The condition of society is one of homogeneity and hyperindustrialism, so the individual perceptions of body and mind are not valued. Poetry is not the expression of the party line. It's that time at night, laying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Disrespect for poets is a kind of tradition.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

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.

I really would like to stop working forever — never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now — and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends... Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

I was putting on a stiff upper lip and trying to fulfill the obligations I thought were demanded of me, taking over my father's role of taking care of my mother... and having to be the recipient of her confessions and emotions but of a delusional nature.

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do.

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.

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.

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

Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.

The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.