The importance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. But second-and more important in the long run-they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance.

Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.