“The new consciousness born in these States can be traced back through old gnostic texts, visions, artists & shamans; it is the consciousness of our ground nature suppressed & desecrated.”

“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”

“Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics”

“It happened all in an instant. The night which had been filled with darkness and whispers ex­ploded in a fiery scream. Huge tear gas canisters came crashing through the branches... I couldn't breathe. I felt sure I was going to die”

"To me, he contains or at least suggests everything I would ever want of, or think to do in, a book. For, isn't it all about freedom finally anyway?"

"Kerouac was one of those men in whom the proportions are mixed just a bit differently than in the rest of us. In him that youthful lunging after sensation was wider, deeper, fuller than in most men"

"Nothing quite like the beat demimonde exists anymore, not with the same literary élan, the same desperate vitality. Being a poor New York writer or painter has become too expensive — or too crushing — to permit such animated congregation"

"His buddies are LSD cultists, Hell's Angels, peace marchers, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac hangers-on, a bookshop owner, a helicopter pilot wounded in Vietnam, and people who prefer anonymity, like Mountain Girl"

"Dylan’s survived, grown up. He’s a giant, like Chaplin or Picasso. Like Brando or Muhammed Ali . . . Nobody else even comes close — Jagger, Springsteen, Paul Simon."

“In 15 years as a poet, playwright, critic, curator, and universal energy source in the lives of the few hundred most creative people in America, Frank O’Hara had rendered that world wholly unprepared to tol­erate his passing.”