Richard Belzer Quotes

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.

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

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik.

My golden dream was to move to New York and live in the Village and become that cool rebel beatnik Jack Kerouac.

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.

I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.

I would dream. I focused all my attention on going to America. The subculture, James Dean, the rock n' roll, the beat writers.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

I was raised on Nirvana and flannel shirts and Rage Against the Machine, and I sort of describe my youth as rebellious and always fighting the system.

I don't think punk ever really dies, because punk rock attitude can never die.

Punk is not really a style of music. It was more like a state of mind.

I will always consider myself a punk because of those experiences in high school. It will always be a part of me.

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.

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.

Punk rock isn't something you grow out of Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of that attitude is 'give us some truth'

My parents were extreme left so everything was against the system. I was walking barefoot in the streets of Paris when I was eight. When I started to DJ they hated it, because for them, nightclubs, and all of this life, was terrible and fake.

I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

I grew up in Berkeley and my parents were hippies, obviously, since my name's 'Jorma.' I didn't watch much television growing up because they weren't into it at all.

The Beat Generation - that term is even more familiar now, even more than say the '70s. Hype is built and established and people link it back to a certain generation, in this case the '40s and '50s. Now everyone knows that that group was the Beat Generation.

Initially, electronic music was anti-establishment, as punk rock and rock n' roll were. The music was shut down; the police were against the parties.