I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried.

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.

what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

What if it was cats who invented technology, would they have TV shows starring rubber sqeaky toys?

Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?