Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

Well, I Didn't Know How To Draw Very Well Back Then, In The '40s And '50s.

We Were Just A One-room Bookstore; We Didn't Have Any Money For Lawyers.

Paperbacks Weren't Considered Real Books In The Book Trade. Up Till Then It Was Just Murder Mysteries, Potboilers, 25-cent Pocket Books Sold In Newsstands. When The New York Publishers Started Publishing Quality Paperbacks, There Was No Place To Buy Them.

I Certainly Was Surprised To Be Named Poet Laureate Of This Far-out City On The Left Side Of The World, And I Gratefully Accept, For As I Told The Mayor, "how Could I Refuse?" I'd Rather Be Poet Laureate Of San Francisco Than Anywhere Because This City Has Always Been A Poetic Center, A Frontier For Free Poetic Life, With Perhaps More Poets And More Poetry Readers Than Any City In The World.

I Didn’t Know That Painters And Writers Retired. They’re Like Soldiers – They Just Fade Away.

I'd Ban All Automobiles From The Central Part Of The City. You See, The Automobile Was Just A Passing Fad. It's Got To Go. It's Got To Go A Long Way From Here.

I Arrived In San Francisco In January 1951. After The Second World War, The Population Was So Uprooted. Soldiers Came Back Home For Brief Periods And Took Off Again. So The Population Was Very Fluid, And Suddenly It Was As If The Continent Tilted West. The Whole Population Slid West. It Took 10 Years For America To Coalesce Into A New Culture. And The New Culture Happened In San Francisco, Not New York.

They Were Looking For A Stable, But We Didn't Have One. In Fact, We Weren't Very Stable Ourselves.

[in The True Mad North] Of Introspection, Where 'falcons Of The Inner Eye' Dive And Die, Glimpsing In Their Dying Fall, All Life's Memory Of Existence.

The Real Literary Editors Have Mostly Been Fired. Those That Remain Are All 'bottom Line' Editors; Everything Depends On The Money.

Almost Every Truly Creative Being Alienated & Expatriated In His Own Country

Southern California, Where The American Dream Came Too True.