Religion - religion, at best - at BEST - is like a lift in your shoe. If you need it for a while, and it makes you walk straight and feel better - fine. But you don't need it forever, or you can become permanently disabled. Religion is like a lift in the shoe, and I say just don't ask me to wear your shoes. And let's not go down and nail lifts onto the natives' feet.

The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition.

I think religion is very anti-man. I think it's a terrible distortion and exploitation of a very natural urge every human has - to be rejoined with the one somehow, to become a part of the universe. Once the high priests and the traders took over, we were lost as a species.

Because we were a poor area, the school had a small budget and was unable to teach the second half of the alphabet.

When you visualize the recent past, do you see it as being somewhere over on the left?

Besides the drugs and counterculture, I started talking about myself, which is the first thing you do when you are a writer.

Is there another word for synonym?