Latest Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes from Interviews

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• Poetry can change the world, just like any art can change the world, by changing consciousness. Of course this was the great slogan of the nineteen sixites hippies’ revolution—enlarge the area of consciousness, which quite often was done by psychedelic means.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Art, Hippie, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Today America's on the wrong side of the world revolution. What I mean by that is, the world revolution is the people's revolution, the liberation movements in all the third world countries, which when everyone tries to get started the U.S. stops.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Country, Mean, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  War, Age, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Art, Couple, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Writing, Lyric Poetry, Giving

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

• Communism wasn't a word that I thought of when I went to Cuba. The original Fidelistas were not Communists. They were graduate students at the university and law students. After the Fidelistas took over, they went to Washington and tried to get support from the U.S. government, which turned them down. They were in a desperate political and economic situation, so they took the offer from the Soviet Union. Communism was a matter of necessity.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Government, Law, Political

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

• You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Book, Thinking, Echoes

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

• T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Book, House, Generations

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

• Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Mean, Challenges, Ifs

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

• 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.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  New York, War, Home

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

• When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Romance, Young, Feels

  "Interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights". Interview with Jonah Raskin, www.sfgate.com. July 2, 2015.