And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

God only allows us to see such things when he wants something to change

In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.

The path of the vitarags [the enlightened ones] is not one of ‘objection’. It is a path of giving ‘no objection’. They remain indifferent if circumstances for objection arises.

If it is necessary for us to do anything [in view of peace], direct us and architect.πρὸς τάδ’ ἡμῖν, εἴ τι χρὴ δρᾶν, φράζε κἀρχιτεκτόνει.

The idea of service to humanity, putting yourself in situations where people have much less than you do, puts life in perspective.

Under the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of religion, the Court has steadily made religion a matter for the private individual by driving it out of the public arena.

I get grumpy about the innate conservatism of our tastes; I love bold theatre, and I get annoyed when a heritage piece is really successful.

I never get afraid of things. I only get excited.

People hate you for 1 of 3 reasons. 1) They hate themselves 2) They want to be you 3) They see you as a threat When you love yourself you are incapable of hating anyone no matter what they've done.

One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.