Gregory Corso Quotes

I was what? - twelve years old - and I was thrown in the cells with these people, so I learned fast.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

My background did not start with the East Side; it started with Greenwich Village, which is West Side.

It's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible

O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living

You see, I went to the sixth grade and that was the highest I ever went.

Now the Tombs, like the name says, are so horrible that they had to close it down. Today it doesn't exist and people go in the electric chair and all that.

Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

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

Spirit is Life. It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea.

A fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman

The other guy I dug a lot was Burroughs because he was a smart man already; he learned it through the druggie pool - the street scene of an old aristocratic kind of man.

I just trust people and they sense everything's gonna be alright.

Dante's step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell.

I learned life were no dream
I learned truth deceived
Man is not God
Life is a century
Death an instant

The lucky thing was that I was Italian; when the other Italians saw me fight back, they came to my defence.

I moved up over Lower East Side and I was adopted by eight foster parents; I lived all over New York City with these parents, man, till I was about ten years old.

My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.

Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climatic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of
bigamy a saint of divorce--

I feel capitol punishment is dooming U.S.A.

I remember the people I knew in prison; I was very fortunate to know them - they came from 1910, 1920, 1930.