Garrett Hedlund Quotes

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

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.

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 wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

Just personally, I've been attached to 'On the Road' since 2007 and it was the greatest thing in my life when I got cast in it. I couldn't believe it. When I was 17 and read the book, I looked it up on IMDb and it said that Francis Ford Coppola was going to direct it.

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 didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters.

I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody.' I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A.

I met William Burroughs in 1971. I got his address through a magazine and went to London to spend time with him.

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

I knew William Burroughs really well, and I was always star struck being around him. I adored him.

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous.

What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

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 beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on.

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

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.

Alan Ginsberg was fabulous. The man is so filled with energy. He's 65 years old and he's just loaded with energy and charm and wit and his mind is constantly racing.

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.