I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.

One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.

And I want to thank all the women that support me. I have wonderful support systems from women of all types who seem dedicated to the notion that Terence McKenna can always be improved. I'm extremely grateful for that. The frontiers are enormous in that dimension.

If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.

I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.