“The surface of things is not where attention should rest.”

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

You’re immortal as long as you live.

The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.

No one knows enough to worry.

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

How do we fight back? By creating art.

We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It’s the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

It’s such sport with these heroes of finance: they are like beads on a string – when one slips off, all the rest follow.

It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

I would like to stay stoned all the time, it scares me it’s so good. I would like to stay stoned every minute of every day for the rest of my life.

I wasn’t supposed to make it out of Detroit. I wasn’t supposed to get a scholarship. I was supposed to be [covering] kicks the rest of my life. But here I am. I’m a man playing with the house’s money, and that’s a dangerous man.

Absence of occupation is not rest.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.

I took my $100,000 and bought a new Corvette, a lot of cocaine, and spent the rest on foolishness.