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.
Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.
I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.
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.
The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.
