I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

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A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

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Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.

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Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

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Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived.

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The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.

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Everything is nothing, with a twist.

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Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

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And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

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I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

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