“You’re immortal as long as you live.”

The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.

I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.

The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

With luck, a writer capable of producing both Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb will not remain unappreciated for long.

I think its important to engage them. And I think it’s important that we continue to fight for human rights, which is essential to denying the next generation of terrorists their recruits and this is a long-term fight we’re in when it comes to the war on terror.

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics

I love to believe that there’s one god but there’s many different religions so there’s just the question of which long distance company you pick.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about “welfare mothers” – a code phrase for people of colour.

A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.