The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist - that it's a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.

No single person who has ever lived will be able to tell you what happens. Period. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong.

Why do you have to translate and decode things? Just let the image be. It will have a special kind of reality that it won't once it's decoded.

Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.

You know the reason I love the stars is because we can't hurt them: we can't burn them, we can't melt them , we can't make them overflow, we can't flood them or burn them up—so we keep reacing for them

. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an [adaptation] of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he's pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That's an interesting way of saying No.

Don't be afraid of anyone. Imagine your life if you're not afraid of anyone.