Conrad Aiken Quotes

I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.

I don't do acid anymore, so I travel instead.

You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.

I used to drink a lot. I had to stop drinking because it was getting the better of me, and I replaced that with really doing shows.

For me from a pretty young age up until about 21 years old hallucinogenics had a huge place in my life.

As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions.

The white people brought whiskey into our village, made our people drunk, and cheated them out of their horses, guns, and traps!...I visited all the whites and begged them not to sell whiskey to my people. One of them continued the practice openly. I took a party of my young men, went to his house, took his barrel and broke in the head and turned out the whiskey.

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.

Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.

The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.

The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawns until they fell down and saw God.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology.

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?

I've found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that have to be talked about.

Do you think it's possible that when we're on something like marijuana or mushrooms and we believe we're having a really spiritual experience that we're just high?

I need to be on drugs to connect with nature.

I'm not regretful about dropping acid, but I could have stopped it a little sooner.

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.

I've tried everything. I can say to you with confidence, I know a fair amount about LSD. I've never been a social user of any of these things, but my curiosity has carried me into a lot of interesting areas.

Basically I got an insight into what it really was through Alcoholics Anonymous. One day the switchboard lit up and I saw where it was all going. I saw what alcohol could do to people and I saw that it wasn't a good thing anymore. Plus I wasn't a teenager anymore myself.