“I stopped taking drugs when I realized that pot smelled bad and LSD trips were becoming like TV reruns. I had had enough inner journeys — I felt I knew myself well enough, thank you.”

“Oh I’m on my way I know I am,
But times there were when I thought not
Bleeding half my soul in bad company,
I thank the moon I had the strength to stop”

“When I was a young man, I found out that if you hurt somebody bad enough, they'll leave you alone. When I tried to leave everybody alone and just do my own thing, everybody just wanted to hurt me. Until one day I just decided, well, I've had enough of this picking. And there were like six young men still figuring they were going to mess with my head. And we went to war. To their surprise, I was no longer taking the beating, I was giving it.”

“I felt like I was just not being myself. I felt like I was hiding. I was hiding from me. I was hiding from sparkle and magic and fun and fearlessness and music and dance and creative magic… I just knew I had feelings. I knew I had thoughts. I knew I had things I wanted to say. Listen, I'm rebellious. Okay? I always have been. And Erika Jayne is a little bit of a rebel too.”

“When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.”

“My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches [things] I had done…and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world.”

“I had a bad PCP [angel dust] experience when I was 14 and I got panic disorder. And of course, I wasn’t telling anyone the truth. It’s not like you go to your dad or your doctor and say, “Yeah, I smoked PCP and I’m having a bad time.” So I became more or less agoraphobic because I’d have flashbacks. From 14 to 16, I didn’t have any friends. I stayed home most of the time. Up till then life was pretty great. The world was big and I felt I could do anything I wanted. Suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t do anything. But in the isolation, my imagination really had time to run. I never did any drugs until my late 20s. Unfortunately, being a child of two alcoholics, I started drinking a lot, and that’s what eventually got me back into drugs. You often hear that pot leads to harder drugs. But I think alcohol is what leads you to everything, because it takes away the fear. The worst drug experimentation I ever did was because I was drunk and didn’t care.”

“I'd had enough. I felt so low: I was 26 and there was an exact moment when I just knew I didn't want to do it any more. I was out with two very good friends of mine, who are now dead. They both died of alcoholism. It was about 3am and I thought: "I don't want this. I have to stop." I'd felt that before, a hundred times, but I woke up next morning and I still didn't want to do it. And that was the first time in ten years I'd had that strength of feeling.”

“Well, with all the experiences I have had, I would say the most disappointing ones are the ones when I have not taken enough.”

“I think pot should be legal. I don’t smoke it, but I like the smell of it.”