Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time.

I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.

I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.

Every morning I have been looking at CNN to see if there is any reason for hope. I see a few large and impressive peace protests here and there around the world, but mostly I see empty robot faces monotonously reciting the magic incantations, "We must support the President" and "We must support our troops," both of which mean the killing must continue.

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.

[Red Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O'Hara.