I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I've never been baptised.

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.

Do not use either harsh words or negative words. They only bring sadness and weaken the soul.

Once you learn how to think you can teach yourself anything.

The financial elite already have the politicians in their pockets, as a result of their lobbying.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life.

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.

I always found the Chicago audience to be a smart, fast-moving, violent and cheerful lot, and it's always good to be back.

Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.

Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.

Nature often seems like an idea that has had its day.