“Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.”

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

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.

If you don’t suffer, you don’t get anything. Nothing easy in life.

He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, “Anything else, Bud?”

Buddy Hackett [was] talking – this is Hackett, not me – about the Virgin Mary, a limerick sort of thing, and all these children and families … the look of absolute horror.

You never really want anything you can easily have.

I enjoy the song writing process more than anything. It’s what I like the most, just sitting in my room with guitar or at the piano or something.

To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.

I get a heavy penance for something I couldn’t help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I’ll never be anything else.

People don’t go and do their own investigations if it’s relationships or politics or anything.