H.P.Lovecraft could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel, that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays.

My father was an extremely brilliant man. I consider him a genius, and so he probably could have joined Mensa. But why? I got in it with a 79 I.Q. and the first day I said, "I'm getting the hell out of here quick!" They're all losers. All they do is talk about their IQ.

I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings.

Both [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff.

I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.

To have that radical a mind in that bourgeois-looking body was really hard for a lot of people to take, because, when my mother would want to have people over she'd tell [my father], "Don't start with the gravity stuff." And then he would invariably do this and the guests would look at each other and say, "Well, I think it's time to go now."

I would say [to my father], "Why don't you actually take some courses in physics instead of saying [you are not believing in gravity]?" But he would never do it. Businessmen for some reason or other, think, because they're successful in a single direction, that they know everything. You know what I mean? You ever meet people like that?