“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Too perfect to be sexually attractive.

There’s no place for impractical dreamers around here.

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

There is no line between the ‘real world’ and ‘world of myth and symbol.’ Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

There isn’t a feeling you can get on drugs that you can’t get without drugs.

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Life is a vacation from two eternities.

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time, and you can’t see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

What a strange scene if the surge of conversation could suddenly ebb like the tide, and show us the real state of people’s minds.

Richard Pryor is, in my mind, the most honest comedian. He bared his soul to people. I think that’s why everybody loved him so much.

Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.

If I stay in one mindset or place for too long, I get crazy.