And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.

My history of moving away from drugs is not the kind you hear from most people. Certainly not from celebrities, especially those professionally recovering people. What I've noticed in my overuse of cocaine is the period of pleasure versus the period of pain. That is to say that when you first get high on anything, the pleasure is predominant and you don't pay much price. A little hangover or whatever it might be with another drug. But after a while the ratio begins to change, and there' s far more pain in the deal than pleasure. It just completely goes in another direction.

Valentine's Day is devoted to love. Why don't we have a day devoted to hatred? The raw, visceral hatred that is felt every hour of the day by ordinary people, but is repressed for reasons of social order. I think it would be very cathartic, and it would certainly make for an exciting six o'clock news.

When it comes to God's existence, I'm not an atheist and I'm not agnostic. I'm an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me.

They're only words. You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth, even if it's an unpleasant truth.

You know, if a drug has anything going for it at all, it should be self-limiting. It should tell you when you've had enough. Acid and peyote were that way for me.

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter.