Allen Ginsberg
44 quotes
Biography
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he befriended Lucien Carr, William S.
"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."
"I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view."
"Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening."
"We're all golden sunflowers inside."
"I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane."
"Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!"
"If I had a soul I sold itfor pretty wordsIf I had a body I usedit up spurting my essenceAllen Ginsberg warns youdont follow my pathto extinction"
"We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter"
"I never dreamed the sea so deep,The earth so dark; so long my sleep,I have become another child.I wake to see the world go wild."
"Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels."
"I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly.God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly."
"Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!"
"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found—the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it."
"I saw Bob Dylan a couple of weeks ago (this being, what, December 1994?) and he was saying… “Who owns all the money? Who owns the media?”. As he travels around the world, he notices that all the media change their story every week, and someone is directing that. And “Who owns all the money?”, he was saying. And it was like he knew that he had a great deal of power, to influence people’s psyches, or minds, or thinking, or psychology, or opinion-ation, and yet his power was miniscule, compared to the power of the moguls of the media. And in America it’s only 22 people who run… who own… 80 percent of the mass-media, so that the… it would be very difficult for a poem… for a poet… to overcome that barrage of bullshit. On the other hand, poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks (like a politician or someone preparing an editorial in a dignified newspaper). So if you need the historical truth of what people think inside, you have to follow Shelley (and his admonition is that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the race”) — or what William Carlos Williams said more acutely was, “The government is of words”. After all, the people making political speeches, they’re writing prose, if not poetry, and they are trying to get a little flowery language in there, but the language is shifty, and the language is manipulative, and people who are advertising, or even doing ordinary mass-media, are still inhibited and can’t say what they really think, but the poet can say what he really thinks, authentically, and that’s the advantage, and it’s longer-lasting than the immediate radio-broadcast or television-broadcast, because a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years. And so, in the long run, it may have an ameliorating effect on the spirit."
"who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz."
"who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night."
"who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may."
"who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness."
"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."
"America I've given you all and now I'm nothing."
"I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
"America, Sacco & Vanzetti must not die."
"You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism."
"1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game."
"My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."