Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghettiis an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind, a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of more than one million copies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 March 1919
CityBronxville, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Lawrence Ferlinghetti quotes about
It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American
I had a show at George Krevsky Gallery this past spring. That show traveled to Woodstock, New York where it showed for six weeks.
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.
Invent a new language anyone can understand.
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.