Allen Ginsberg Quotes

From the start, I've always admired Eminem's thinking. That's the reason I wanted to appear on the Grammys with him when I was asked. Eminem has the balls to say what he feels and to make offensive things funny. That's very necessary today in America, with people being muzzled and irony becoming a lost art. Artists like Eminem who use their free speech to get a point across are vitally important. There just aren't many people in the world with balls that big and talent that awesome.

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

Sixteen years I've pounded my head against the mentality of America, which...I'd say it's about an 8th grade emotional level.

Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

His [Andy warhol] films were way ahead of the times...and I'm not suggesting this has all necessarily been a good thing for America, mind you. I kind of think we're all in a really big mess, kind of like the end days of the Roman Empire.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Writers who open up horizons for other people are performing a function every bit as important as a consciously politicized writer.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.

The very fact of seeking specialization is probably what makes America so great in these two hundred years. But also, the sensation that somebody who wants to understand America doesn't really need to visit it much.

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked — or that America is culturally bankrupt.

You weren't supposed to hear Elvis Presley. You weren't supposed to hear Jerry Lee Lewis. You weren't supposed to hear Robert Johnson. You weren't supposed to hear Hank Williams. And they told the story of the secret America.

With a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.

I just grew up with it [The Simpsons]. The first season came on when I was 5, 6 years old, and the show evolved as I was growing up and got funnier and funnier and, by the time I was in 12th grade, they were at their funniest.

I won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our ways of thinking and feeling-about ourselves, those we love, those we hate, those we realize are hopelessly 'other' to us-are more shaped by Shakespeare than they are by the experience of our own lives.

I felt if I went chronologically, I'd get bogged down in childhood and that's part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.

Comedy is a blood sport. It flays the truth and spurts twisted logic. In America, people become comics because we don't have bullfighting.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

I knew that there was an aspect to this story that was beyond the typical and that it was something very important about America, about our culture, and about bringing a story to a new generation that perhaps didn't know the details of it, (and) hadn't had the visceral experience that this film is [42].

The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

So much has already been said about Shakespeare that there doesn't seem to be anything more to say; yet it is the quality of the spirit that it forever stimulates the spirit.

Modern dance isn't anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

No matter how much people want to pretend that they're embarrassed by it, that they don't watch it, everybody knows about it. It's truly, I believe, one of the only art forms that America has actually given to the world, besides jazz and comic books.

This is America, and we don't restrict our battles over people's sex lives to 11 months a year