Quote collection
519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires."
"Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture."
"In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail."
"I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum."
"In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs."
"The function of the artist is to provide what life does not."
"Some praise me, some blame me. I go the other way. Sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things which afford us the greatest privacy"
"There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself."
"Cultural institutions by and large share one primary objective: herd control. Even when ostensibly benign, their propensity for manipulation, compartmentalization, standardization and suppression of potentially disruptive behavior or ideas, has served to freeze the evolution of consciousness practically in its tracks."
"You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It's in your blood, but you're not concerned with it anymore."
"I can't remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had... to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I've always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it."
"If we're ever going to get the world back on a natural footing, back in tune with natural rhythyms, if we're going to nurture the Earth and protect it and have fun with it and learn from it - which is what mothers do with their children - then we've got to put technology (an aggressive masculine system) in its proper place, which is that of a tool to be used sparingly, joyfully, gently and only in the fullest cooperation with nature. Nature must govern technology, not the other way around."
"What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other peoples' decisions for them?"
"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being."
"Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool."
"There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong."
"Every day is Judgement Day. Always has been. Always will be."
"I think when I'm 80 years old, 85, hopefully, I'll be pushed around in a wheelchair by a red-headed nurse with panty outline. She'll make me little tequila sunrises and I'll read my complete works then. Then, I'll decide whether I think I've done something good or not. I'll reserve my judgment until then."
"The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically."
"The Devil doesn't make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn't make us mean. Rather, when we're mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world."