Allen Ginsberg

I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature. ”

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts. ”

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. ”

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. ”

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh. ”

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. ”

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? ”

I was putting on a stiff upper lip and trying to fulfill the obligations I thought were demanded of me, taking over my father's role of taking care of my mother... and having to be the recipient of her confessions and emotions but of a delusional nature. ”