Allen Ginsberg

Follow your inner moonlight dont hide the madness.

Night is the wonderful opportunity to take rest to forgive to smile to get ready for all the battles that you have to fight tomorrow.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

I had a moment of clarity saw the feeling in the heart of things walked out to the garden crying.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

We're all golden sunflowers inside.

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

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

I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

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 weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.

First thought best thought.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

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.

To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.

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.