In my neighborhood - West 121st Street in New York, "white Harlem" - there were only two drugs: smack and marijuana. By the time I was 13, some friends and I were using marijuana fairly regularly. The Reefer Madness myth was still very strong then, but I'd been into jazz and those lyrics included so many casual references to pot that it was completely demystified for me.

Tell people an invisible man in the sky created all things, they believe you. Tell them what you've painted is wet, they have to touch it to believe.

Cocaine was different. It kept saying, "You haven't had enough." I became an abuser almost instantly.

[On School Uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence.

You've built up so much speed that you HIT 70! After that it's a day-by-day thing; you HIT Wednesday!