Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

Punk is not just the sound, the music. Punk is a lifestyle.

At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik.

When I was a kid in the '50s, I was very enamored of beatniks and... a kind of dark sensibility.

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.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.

Everybody was starting to grow long hair and wear pink suits and purple glasses and stuff and then, I suppose, some people thought we were crazy, but we weren't really crazy because we're all still here!

I hate the word 'hippy'. I hate a lot of people, and hippies don't do that!

I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

I can't live in a world of dullards. So I think on that level, I'm definitely punk.

We lived on anarchist farms, squatted in the inner city, and hopped rail cars. We wanted to see how other young people were creating meaning from their lives.

The older I get, the more of an anarchist I become, and I don't mean in a punk rock way.

Punk became a circus didn't it? Everybody got it wrong. The message was supposed to be: Don't follow us, do what you want!

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.

I grew up in Berkeley and my parents were hippies, obviously, since my name's 'Jorma.' I didn't watch much television growing up because they weren't into it at all.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.

I don't hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by the tabloids or popular opinion. I don't like bourgeois values. I say you find your own way to live.

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

'Punk' doesn't mean Mohawks and safety pins. It's about not conforming.

I never thought of punk rock as the absolute act of rebellion for the sake of rebellion. There's a lot of that in there, but for me I think punk rock was always about questioning things and making decisions for yourself, which is a great message to pass on to your kids.

My parents were hippies.