If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.

Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come.

From the air, Vatican City looked like a marble Monopoly set. The Church owned all the property from Broadwalk to Illinois Avenue, has three hotels on every lot, and no matter how often it tossed the dice you just knew it would never land on Go to Jail, it would be forever passing Go and collecting $200.

From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.

The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living - busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing - they are busy taking over.

Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half.

Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers as they were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society.