I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?

I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I'd been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion...well, surely there was a way to learn that trick.

Nobody wants to do it - not real change, not soul change, not the painful molecular change required to truly become who you need to be. Nobody ever does real transformation for fun. Nobody ever does it on a dare. You do it only when your back is so far against the wall that you have no choice anymore.

When I read the article [in The New Yorker] by David Grann, I was very struck by people responding to the article, of people thinking I was such a hero and what a wonderful person I was, and I didn't feel that at all. I felt like I had very much, like Todd [Willingham], taken a path of self-preservation.

I think that if you can roast a chicken, you can get whatever you want out of a woman.

The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go

The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.