“You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.”

The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it’s real. I don’t think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can’t fool everybody.

I think that the revolution in music is over, and what’s left is a mop-up action. It’s a matter of the news getting out to everybody else.

An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

The result, I think, is pretty interesting … we don’t expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top.

We didn’t invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead.

Every silver lining has a touch of grey.

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That’s the nature of America, I think.

So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.

There is some art that says the same thing to everybody. WE need something like that. What that is, I don’t know. But virtual reality may be the key to it.

Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.

What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had.

Everything is traditionally slow – much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.

There’s a lot there to enlarge you. That’s part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.

And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

I’ll try any guitar just to see if it’s different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere.

I don’t know why, it’s the same reason why you like some music and you don’t like others. There’s something about it that you like. Ultimately I don’t find it’s in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it’s fundamentally emotional.

We are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.

For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner?

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn’t learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish.

Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.