Beatnik Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Charles De Lint

2. "I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along."
Author: Charles Manson

3. "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."
Author: Christopher Moore

4. "Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos."
Author: David Lee Roth

5. "Decisi di diventare un beatnik a tutti gli affetti[...]. Fumai tutta la marijuana che mi passava tra le mani, lessi Kerouac, ascoltai Bob Dylan e Roland Kirk e andai a vedere film francesi che non capivo."
Author: Howard Marks

6. "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."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

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

8. "And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) 'no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony...it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time...Yay, for this, more aloneness"
Author: Jack Kerouac

9. "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."
Author: Janis Joplin

10. "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."
Author: Lisa Mantchev

11. "We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists."
Author: Richie Havens

12. "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."
Author: Sarah Vowell

13. "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."
Author: Tom Folsom

Beatnik Quotes Pictures