Violence begets violence, you know. And you can't kill off all the violent people or all the murderers. We'd have to kill off the government.

Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same type of “experts” who made them up in the first place.

I don't want to be king, I want to be real.

I've always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won't be finished until I am dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.

I've never met anybody who's had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I've never met anybody who had any problem. I've had bad trips, but I've had bad trips in real life. I've had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant; I don't have to take anything.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it.