I've been to too many Dead concerts. There've been smokin' holes where my memory used to be.

When you're around the whole Dead scene, they're there as a tribal thing; they're there as part of a rendezvous and a pow-wow.

Luckily, I remembered something Malcolm Cowley had taught us at Stanford - perhaps the most important lesson a writing class (not a writer, understand, but a class) can ever learn. 'Be gentle with one another's efforts,' he often admonished us. 'Be kind and considerate with your criticism. Always remember that it's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.'

Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.

The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.

- he's finished with that; it's like an old clock that won't tell time but won't stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.