What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.

Buddhism is all about finding your own way, not imitating the ways of others or even the ways of Buddha himself.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Sometimes people pick up pet worries that they'll entertain themselves with and that was my big one. So as far as thinking about what that means, one of the definitions of insanity is that you lose your ability to communicate to anybody because your frames of reference have become so different from the rest of the world that you can't communicate anymore.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, "Listen Godzilla, you don't have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine".

I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.