I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

If you play the cultural game, it's like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded.

I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.