“If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.”

To me, that’s the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the basic, ultimate freedom.

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.

You don’t want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.

We were just in line to see what was going to happen.

We have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us – certainly more satisfying, because it doesn’t restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style.

The thing of being able to share somebody’s reality, which has so far been a matter of what communication is about, you know.

What a long strange trip it’s been.

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.

I liked different etymologies, different slang that came out in different eras. Different languages. Different dialects.

The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

I forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.