“Do you know Herbert Huncke?” Allen Ginsberg asked. “He’s the oldest living junkie in New York, and an old sidekick of Burroughs and Kerouac”

“Nabokov's reputation as a novelist, scholar, translator, and lepidop­terist is unassailable, but not many people know that he was also a great teacher (on the other hand, those of us who took his courses in the early '50s didn't have the vaguest notion he'd written a single word of fiction)”

25-year-old Dylan has already won this generation of rebels, just as Kerouac and Camus have won earlier generations: his words, values, imagery, even his eccentric life-style, are grooved into more under-30 brains than any other writer's.

The funeral notices had been printed. They were small stiff cards, bordered in black, reading “HIPPIE. In the Haight-Ashbury district of this city, Hippie, de­voted son of Mass Media. Friends are invited to attend services beginning at sunrise, October 6, 1967, at Buena Vista Park.”

"It would be a tragic and immoral mistake to identify the mass of Negroes with the very small number that succumb to cheap and dishonest slogans, just as it would be a serious error to identify all Jews with the few who exploit Negroes under their economic sway."

“What he said was not important. It was the man who lent weight to the words. It was his presence felt, his integrity sensed. Such a man could make the telephone book seem like the gospel.”