“It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It’s just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don’t like it.”

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.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win!

You can’t repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.

The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially.

Music is a universal language insofar as you don’t need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music.

Too much of a good thing is just about right

And when you don’t have to talk to the person next to you, that’s real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another.

You can’t always just put color filters in 80s aerobic videos or take stuff from public-access and look at it in this very ironic, self-conscious way. That only takes you so far.

I’ve learned how to use my spam filter pretty effectively.

It is trying to imagine, remember the story, read it, put it down, and then write sort of an outline without the book in front of you with some hope that what you like about it will be filtered and distilled out through your memory and then that will be similar to what other people like about it.

If you filter my words through any tradition or ‘-ism’, you will miss altogether what I am saying. The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind.

None is fitter than the three lower degrees of Freemasonry

In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.

What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look – at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.

The past is always with us, in the form of our photographs, which we feel as we might a rosary, wearing them smooth with the fingering of our eyes.