I'm here today because of LSD. LSD gave me the confidence to be who I am today. Completely.

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.

Don’t sleep with people who don’t read.

My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.

True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.

Without obsession, life is nothing.

[My catholic education] sticked with me. It caused the rage I had to make 'Pink Flamingos.'

Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.

Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?

I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.

The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" hitchhiker really made people never want to hitchhike again - the hitcher, the show. Hitchhiking is always vaguely sexual.

Technology - the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

It's nothing to do with us at all, our success is due to the taste of the public.

Love yourself, open your heart which means doing the work on yourself first. Then love will follow.

We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.

I think this was a change election, as David Axelrod said. It was a primal scream by many who feel that a discredited elite failed them, economically and politically.

When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.

Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By.

[T]he only good loan is one that gets paid back.

You are more valuable than both heaven and earth. What else can I say? You don’t know your own worth.