Allen Ginsberg

I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.

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.

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

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.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.