Tom Verlaine Quotes

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.

My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.

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

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.

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

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

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

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

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.

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

I had really wanted adventure. At the time that I ran away, lots of kids ran away from home. It was something of a social phenomenon.

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.

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 was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

I remember being really young - being 13 or 14 - when I first was really excited about punk rock as an idea, and I was like, 'Don't ever not be punk. Don't ever not be punk.' Telling that to myself, I guess it was like self-defense against the scary world around me.

I never really felt at home with that - the headbands, the roses, the feet, the peace sign, all that bollocks. That wasn't me at all; I felt like a fish totally out of water during the mid-'60s thing.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

PUNK IS: the personal expression of uniqueness that comes from the experiences of growing up in touch with our human ability to reason and ask questions.

Punk rock is just another word for freedom.

Rock'n'roll is not red carpets and MySpace friends, rock'n'roll is dangerous and should piss people off

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives

I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.