Anyone who grew up in the psychedelic '60s probably experienced their share of hypnagogic fireworks. Just as sex got me hooked on anatomy, so drugs were probably what first got me interested in entoptic phenomena, phosphenes, and hypnagogic imagery.

I'd done a drawing of the model using only peripheral vision, looking at a spot on the wall to the right of where she sat. It wasn't really a drawing of her I produced; it was a drawing of the cloud of lights and darks she dissolved into when I focused on the spot. You could look at my drawing of this cloud and read it as a nude female figure, though a little translation was required.

I wanted to be a poet and/or an artist, but I was very lazy (frightened of failure, I guess) and drank too much.

My ignorance would require a volume to itself. Between its covers would be preserved a record of the spurious model of all creation I had in my head, a prelapsarian construct, uncorrupted by the facts.

For decades I'd flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others.

The goal of all my work is essentially the same: demonstrating that magic is real or that reality is magic, by paying attention, and finding compensation or consolation for what is essentially a tragic existence.

Some songs seem to achieve the quality of a geometric object - a ball, box, or cone - and I don't mess with 'em.