We didn't invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were just in line to see what was going to happen.

What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense. The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.

It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.

I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.

Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets. Done time on the upswing, and time in defeat. I know what I'm askin'. I know it's a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that's left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.