“Irreverence is our only sacred cow.”

“Listen to the speeches, one after another telling the audience what it already knows, evoking applause with necessary cliches, no longer shocking anybody with the shocking facts of the war because you can become so jaded with horror that you develop an emotional callous.”

“As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners”

“How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing?”

“You're never alone when you're a schizophrenic. — Of course I talk to myself, I often find that it's the only way to have an intelligent conversation”

“The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us to speak of the ego as if it were something different and apart: it is the true Self whereas the ego is only an illusion of the mind.”

“And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.”