Beatnik Quotes

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. ~ Janis Joplin

The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along. ~ Charles Manson

What's Your Road, Man? ~ Jack Kerouac

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. ~ Judd Apatow

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. ~ Janis Joplin

When you got back to his apartment, the flamenco dancers were still stomping around in the restaurant upstairs. Moriarity pushed a bottle of cheap Sauterne and sliced salami across the kitchen table. A large cockroach fell from the top of the refrigerator and landed with a click on the scarred linoleum floor. You lifted both your feet and curled your toes. ~ Lorena Cassady

Honey, were you trying to be a 1950s beatnik from Funny Face or something?" He guesses, correctly. "It is one thing to channel your inner Audrey Hepburn, but it is quite another to wear a mock turtleneck and capris to a Hollywood event. This is the big time, sweetheart; you best check your costume at the door. ~ Katie Delahanty

Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip. Retro, Norm had explained earlier, was cresting, and he was catching the wave by wearing a psychedelic poncho, fatigue pants, love beads, and an earring with a dangling peace sign. Groovy, man. His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair newly curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell. Che ~ Harlan Coben

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic. ~ Jack Kerouac

How can she create with all your negative energy?"
"Yeah, man. You're bringing us down."
"This is about as low as it gets," Ariel said. "Where did you get those ridiculous black berets?"
Moth adjusted his recently donned beatnik attire. "This is what the hip cats wear , daddy-o."
"Can you dig it?" Cobweb stroked a few wisps of fake chin hair, while the others nodded and snapped their fingers. ~ Lisa Mantchev

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

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. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long.

On Starvation Ridge
little sticks
Are trying to grow. ~ Jack Kerouac

I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

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. ~ Marc Maron

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art. ~ Harvey Pekar

Paradise!' he screamed. 'The one and only indispensable Paradise. ~ Jack Kerouac

Shared emotions experienced by two souls,empathy on unequivocal level which Davey believed would change entire species of mankind if only secret of empathy could be telepathically shared with humanity,one soul after another, until every soul understood true meaning of love. ~ Christina Westover

But lately I'm like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let's be pure of heart again! ~ Jenny Offill

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. ~ Charles De Lint

Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don't mean as a bride, I'm not so gauche as that, but as a mistress or paramour or concubine or companion or friend or pal or anything else. I just don't want to be left alone! I want to get out of here!" She said it again for all the wide-faced flowers to hear: "I want to get out of here! ~ Douglas Woolf

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. ~ Jack Kerouac

Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like. ~ Christina Westover

Because the only people for me are the mad ones. ~ Jack Kerouac

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. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute, "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made. ~ Sarah Vowell

Looking up occasionally to see rare cars crossing the high bridge and wondering what they'd see on this drear foggy night if they knew a madman was down there a thousand feet below in all that windy fury sitting in the dark writing in the dark - Some sort of sea beatnik, tho anybody wants to call me a beatnik for THIS better try it if they dare - The huge black rocks seem to move - The bleak awful roaring isolateness, no ordinary man could do it I'm telling you - I am a Breton! I cry and the blackness speaks back "Les poissons de la mer parlent Breton" (the fishes of the sea speak Breton) - Nevertheless I go there every night even tho I dont feel like it, it's my duty (and probably drove me mad), and write these sea sounds, and all the whole insane poem "Sea". ~ Jack Kerouac

Driving down deserted early morning roads. Round and round. Round downtown. Through naked streets. Lips pursed on two litre bottles of beer, but pursuing the lips of freedom's night. Swapping cars. Winding up at karaoke bars or Bolsi- the best place in town. For the food. For the folk. For the service. For the crema de papaya. And for that late night dawn's whiskey coffee. ~ Harry Whitewolf

They're auras, Davey. I see them, too. The longer you stare at them, the wider the energy field expands until more colors begin to show themselves. ~ Christina Westover

The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and faded jeans, looked very shocked when he saw the headline text. "Sydney Tar Ponds, Is It As Dangerous As People Say? Well," he exclaimed, glancing at the front photo, which featured the Sydney Steel Corporation, along with its plumes of orange smog. "You know, most people your age are really against that mill, as if it's a disease. We have university students protesting every few weeks or so… strangely enough, the ones who have parents who rely on that steel mill to pay the bills."

"What about the pollution?" Wendy questioned, almost accusingly, as if it was his fault. "What if dangerous chemicals are in the environment?"

"Hey kid, I don't even work at the mill, never have, but my father, my uncle, their father, cousins, all worked there," the prints shop man argued, placing the newspapers in a cardboard box and taping it shut. "When it comes down to all that 'go green' crap, you have to ask yourself, is it worth risking a person's income, their job, their family… their life? I'm not saying you're wrong, but these newspapers might have a point. ~ Rebecca McNutt

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable ~ Henry Miller

I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

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. ~ Barney Hoskyns