“I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.”

Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.

You need music, I don’t know why. It’s probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual.

I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It’s mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that.

Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You’re Alive Is By How Much Pain You’re Experiencing, Or How Little.

The nature of what we’re doing is something, which is by its very nature, is non-formulaic.

American society has gone completely into denial.

Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets. Done time on the upswing, and time in defeat.

I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win! live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!

We play at the religious services of the new age. Everybody gets high, and that’s what it’s all about really.

People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that’s left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.

I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn’t fit humans. Humans can’t possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed.

I mean, just because you’re a musician doesn’t mean all your ideas are about music.

We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music.

What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet. We’re not thinking about anything else.

What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

I want the best product for my audience, and if I don’t care 100%, who will? It’s my name, my likeness that goes out there.

Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.

A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.

It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.