Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

I dont fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.

The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.

All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?

Bodily fluids and solids are universally the most disgusting things we as human beings can come upon, but as long as they are inside us, it's part of you.

Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.

Say what you know.

Smile while you still have teeth.

Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

Maybe, just maybe, I would like to become a real spiritual teacher, a working lama!

I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'

The more men believe an idea to be true the greater the likelihood that the idea is mistaken. Those who are right usually stand alone.

Refuse to let an old person move into your body.

People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument.