Charles de Lint Quotes

We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.

I dress as a combination of space cowgirl and San Francisco art teacher.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

I am inspired by the appearance of a bohemian of the new millennium.

Everyone in those days expected that art students were wild, licentious characters. We didn't know how to be, but we sure were anxious to learn.

Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw.

I grew up in Greenwich Village. Dad was friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

My golden dream was to move to New York and live in the Village and become that cool rebel beatnik Jack Kerouac.

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

I would describe my personal style as putting Twiggy and Yoko Ono together. It is hobo with no rules.

I was never really a bohemian. I was a sloppy guy who liked cheap apartments and the arts, and who was very left-wing politically as the 60's progressed, though it took me a little while.

To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist.

I always try to act like I'm some old school artist from the 1960s.

There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

I did go through a Goth thing, but that was a long time ago. I just like artists that shake it up, that piss people off or make people think or rattle the cage somehow.

I am a black new wave artist.

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.

There is in all artists a little of the vagabond.

I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.

I'm just kind of a hippie. Age is not that relevant to the music.

To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip -artists were supposed to be like cowboys.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

Literature, like a gypsy, to be picturesque, should be a little ragged.