My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

Well, I won't say what I thought about them, particularly related to Bill Gates, but I would say it's astounding to me how human people are. I mean, it, here you had a guy that was a convicted guy, a sensational con man, and the percentage of people that he knocked off. I mean, whether it was, he found their weakness, it might have been sex. It might be power, it might be, whatever it might be.

When I was a child the mailman came once a day. Now the mail arrives every moment. I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

I was forced to think very hard about what it meant to be me, what it means to be a person who is only a brain. Pascal's 'thinking reed' really does capture it, because I'm just a bunch of dead muscles thinking.

everyone saw me as a victim of a terrible illness. But what happened to my body was far less frightening than what happened to my soul. The stroke wiped out my faith. It took me so far from my guru that I felt my oxygen cord had been cut. ... I couldn't put the two together. Then I thought, maybe the stroke is a form of grace, and I hunted for that: how could the stroke be seen as grace? ... The stroke was giving me lessons, advanced lessons. ... It brought me into my soul, and that's grace.

I was close to death, and I didn't rush into my spirit. I spent the time in the hospital just looking at the pipes on the ceiling. ... I failed because this was a trauma, a trauma, and I'm not reacting to it spiritually.

Well, I—I've experienced that the stroke was grace. It was grace, for me, to play, to get inside, grace. I was dependent. These are things that I—those, those were graceful things. You know, pushed. And just go inside, to be—you're a quote "author" and it's a cultural thing, that role, to get into your head. But it's a head game. It's a head game. And I wanted to get down to my spiritual identity. And the stroke placed me at the spiritual identity.

This is why I could speak the way I did yesterday. In California, the stroke is incredible grace because it gives me a prescription to buy pot. ... Pot takes away the pain and frees me from spasticity. ... The marijuana gives me soul perspective. It makes the stroke livable.