“I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.”

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.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win! live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!

We play at the religious services of the new age. Everybody gets high, and that’s what it’s all about really.

People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that’s left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.

I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn’t fit humans. Humans can’t possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed.

I mean, just because you’re a musician doesn’t mean all your ideas are about music.

We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music.

What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet. We’re not thinking about anything else.

I want to still be able to garden while I can bend over.

The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome…

I have never been able to understand why perfectly sensible people waste time being wittily obscure instead of just saying what they want and going on about their business.

When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else.

Putting a label [homosexual] on myself was a big step forward…once I said, ‘Yes, that’s me, that’s what I am,’ I was able to work with it.

If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

Once you start rewriting, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.