Beat Generation - The Beats Comment On The Beat Generation

The Beats Comment On The Beat Generation

"The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."

- Amiri Baraka

Three writers do not a generation make.

- Gregory Corso (sometimes also attributed to Gary Snyder).

“Beat means to have all the blather knocked out of you by experience, suddenly seeing things as they are. Beat doesn’t mean a broken spirit, on the contrary, it’s scourged of external blather!”

- Gregory Corso

"Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose."

- Allen Ginsberg

"John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'"

- Jack Kerouac

"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."

- Jack Kerouac