My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality.

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.

As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.

I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.

My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.