Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.

Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

When the cartoonist is trying to talk honestly and seriously about life, then I believe he has a responsibility to think beyond satisfying the market's every whim and desire.

The only reason you should be an entrepreneur is because that's the only way the idea will come into the world.

I went to Havana, and I was like, "Wow, there's culture everywhere!" That was one thing that I did notice when I went to Cuba was that artists are paid to be artists, and poets are paid to be poets, and musicians are paid to be musicians by the government. The government - and I'm not saying that the Cuban government's perfect - but the government does place a value on culture.

There shall be poets! When woman's unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man--hitherto detestable--having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.

Even if the script's well written there's something about the life of an improvisation that resonates better than a written word, sometimes.

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

Doesn't the world need the painter's praise anymore?

Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it.

It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!

I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

I do not enjoy the promotional side of being a writer, to be blunt about it. Even with the little amount that is expected of me, which is nothing compared to the life of an artist. Writers can live in obscurity and come out of the woodwork with a book, then go back in. Artists don’t have that luxury.

You have a point," said Fronto, "and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Poetry is the gate through which I enter the land of enchantment. Once inside the flaming wall, my limitations fall from me, and my spirit is free.

I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.