I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake.

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

When I get depressed, or anything, I go 'think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!' So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?

If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.

Each one of us is a set of shifting molecules, spinning in ecstasy.

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.

Sometimes you can grow more in a shorter amount of time with the right company than years of soul-searching alone, or by living the same patterns you've lived for your entire life.

Some Buddhists have criticized secular Buddhism because they think it waters down Buddhism. I like to think of it as adding Buddhist flavoring to the sparkling water of secularism.

The dominant expression of a child is gravity.

We will help the Hispanic-American people, who have been treated so badly and so unfairly in our nation, we will help them.

Nos numeros sumus et fruges consumere nati. We are but ciphers, born to consume earth's fruits.

If you can't sell your product, it's not a product-it's a hobby.

I don't want to be a spokesperson.

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

If I fall, pick up the flag, kiss it, and keep on going.