Beatnik Quotes

I like [Count] Olaf's wardrobe, because the whole thing seems like it should be a period piece in many ways, and yet the date is non-specific. So I would wear cloaks and jackets, but also turtlenecks. I was a little beatnik, and kind of hipster in that way.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

The first time I met Prince he invented me to his birthday party in Minneapolis. It was a costume party and I came as a beatnik - a beret and a charcoal goatee. He was dressed like an executioner. I talked to him for awhile and he didn't know who I was, and when I told him he was real surprised.

Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be.

As I became very conscious and more aware of things I got very into the beatniks and that kind of stuff. They were very important to me for a few years.

From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.

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.

My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up. He loved Lenny [Bruce]. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beatnik-y, you know, for Salt Lake City. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.

Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.

We also have a lot of the same influences - we both read a lot of the beatniks. And yet what we actually do is almost exactly the opposite. His [ Hunter S. Thompson] political stuff is just wonderful, but basically nothing happens.

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.

The only thing I really wanted to be was a beatnik, and look what happened: I ended up being in a band.

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

I think that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do.

Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik. Meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time. That's all I ever wanted. Except I knew I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers off of it. All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock 'n' roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me. And I decided then and there that that was it. I never wanted to do anything else. It was better than it had been with any man, you know. Maybe that's the trouble.

It is a great feeling to know that from a window I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves. And from these gather enough dream to sneak out a back door.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

I got interested in Zen when I was a teenage beatnik on the streets of San Francisco. And it was my interest in Zen, in part, that got me into the Marine Corps, because that was a ticket to Asia. So I spent a couple of years on Okinawa and began reading and thinking about how I wanted to go about conducting my life.

I got treated very badly in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik, though they'd never seen one and neither had I.

It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents' generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents' generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks

There's this whole post-modern, nuevo beatnik, retro-bohemian thing going on, you know what I mean? You walk into some coffee shops, and it feels like you're an ex-patriot in Paris in the 20s. You're like, 'Hey, isn't that a young Ernest Hemingway over there? Yeah, I think it is! Hey, let's go have a look and see what he's writing... It's a Gap application.'

But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind'll blow it back.

Woe to those who spit on the beat generation, the wind will blow it back.

When LOVE played the still hipper Whisky A Go-Go, further west along Sunset, Arthur Lee claims they 'started the whole hippy thing' in tandem with an in-crowd of freaks led by aging beatnik sculptor Vito Paulekas. It was Vito, Carl Franzoni, Sue, Beatle Bob, Bryan Maclean and me...people would come to Ben Frank's to hang out with us after we played shows.

I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.

Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad “Joey”, Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.