I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it.

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

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.

In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

Love makes the world go 'round, it's true, but lust stops the world in its tracks; love renders bearable the passage of time, lust causes time to stand still, lust kills time, which is not to say that it wastes it or whiles it aimlessly away but rather that it annihilates it, cancels it, extirpates it from continuum; preventing, while lasts, any lapse into the tense and shabby woes of temporal society, lust is the thousand-pound odometer needle on the dashboard of the absolute.

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.