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

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.

I'm not a visionary, but I've spent half my life drawing things Imagined, Remembered, and Observed, comparing the differences between them, and my study confirms that "the difference between night and day / is not as great as people say."

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

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.

Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat.