Members of the generation that came of age after World War II-Korean War who join in a relaxation of social and sexual tensions, and who espouse anti-regimentation, mystic-disaffiliation, and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of cold-war disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac.

I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with 'Beat'... the vision of the word Beat as being to mea…

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

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…

I've said it before, and it's absolutely true: we were the group that drove a stake through the heart of the love generation.

On jazz: 'Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other coun…

A colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. A Negro is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. A nigger, he's loud and boisterous…