~I am the Lizard King. I can do 
anything.

~A friend is someone who lets you have total freedom
to be yourself.

~Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, 
fear
has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and 
vanishes.
You are free.

~We're like actors, turned loose in this world to 
wander
in search of a phantom, endlessly searching for a 
half-
formed shadow of our lost reality. When others demand
that we become the people they want us to be, they 
force
us to destroy the person we really are. It's a subtle 
kind
of murder. The most loving parents and relatives 
commit
this murder with smiles on their faces.

~I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human 
with
the soul of a clown, which always forces me to blow 
it at
the most important moments.

~I think the highest and lowest points are the 
important
ones. Anything else is just...in between. I want the 
freedom
to try everything.

~ I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and 
literature;
my heroes are artists and writers.

~If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to 
deliver
people from the limited ways in which they see and 
feel.

~I'm a word man. See, there's this theory about the 
nature
of tragedy, that Aristotle didn't mean catharsis for 
the
audience but a purgation of emotions for the actors 
them-
selves. The audience is just a witness to the event 
taking
place on stage.

~When you make your peace with authority, you become 
an
authority.

~Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join 
its
fragments, and The Doors are looking for such a 
ritual also.
A kind of electric wedding. We hide ourselves in the 
music
to reveal ourselves.

~We are from the West. The world we suggest should be 
of a
new wild West, a sensuous, evil world, strange and 
haunting.
The path of the sun.

~A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel 
against the
facts of existence and seems to conquer them. 
Obviously that
can only work at moments. It can't be a lasting 
thing. That's
not saying that people shouldn't keep  trying to 
rebel against
the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might 
conquer
death, disease and war.

~Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality. 
I was
curious to see what would happen. That's all it was: 
curiosity.

~It's a search, an opening of one door after another. 
Our
work, our performing, is a striving for a 
metamorphosis. Right
now, we're more interested in the dark side of life, 
the evil
thing, the night time. But through our music, we're 
striving,
trying to break through to a cleaner, freer realm. 
Our music
and personalities as seen in the performance are 
still in a
state of chaos and disorder, with maybe an element of 
purity
just showing. Lately, when we've appeared in concert, 
it's
started to merge.

~Think of us as erotic politicians.

~The only time I really open up is on stage. I feel 
spiritual
up there. Performing gives me a mask, a place to hide 
myself
where I can reveal myself. I see it as more than 
performing,
going on, doing songs, and leaving. I take everything
personally, and don't really feel I've done a 
complete job
unless we've gotten everybody in the theatre on 
common ground.

~I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. 
Everyone
stops, points up and gasps "Oh look at that!" Then- 
whoosh, and
I'm gone...and they'll never see anything like it 
ever again...
and they won't be able to forget me- ever.

~I offer images- I conjure memories of freedom that 
can still be
reached- like the Doors, right? But we can only open 
the doors,
we can't drag people through. I can't free them 
unless they want to
be free. Maybe primitive people have less bullshit to 
let go of,
to give up. A person has to be willing to give up 
everything- not
just wealth. All the bullshit that he's been taught- 
all society's
brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get 
to the other
side. Most people aren't willing to do that.

~I've had a good time these last three or four years. 
I've met
a lot of interesting people and seen things in a 
short space of
time that I probably would not have run into in 
twenty years of
living. I can't say I regret it. If I had it to do 
over, I think
I would have gone for the quiet, undemonstrative 
artist, plodding
away in his own garden.

~The birth of rock & roll coincided with my 
adolescence, my
coming into awareness. It was a real turn-on, 
although at the
time I could never allow myself to rationally 
fantasize about
doing it myself. I guess all that time I was 
unconsciously
accumulating inclination and listening. So when it 
finally
happened, my subconscious had prepared the whole 
thing.

~Initially, I didn't start out to be a member of a 
band. I wanted
to make films, write plays, books. When I found 
myself in a band,
I wanted to bring some of these ideas into it. We 
never did much
with it, though.

~People are afraid of themselves, of their own 
reality; their
feelings most of all. People talk about how great 
love is, but
that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. 
People
are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can 
they deal
with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to 
wake us up.
People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. 
Pain is
something to carry, like a radio. You feel your 
strength in the
experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. 
That's what
matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part 
of you.
Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and 
hide
them, you're letting society destroy your reality. 
You should
stand up for your right to feel your pain.

~I think there's a whole region of images and 
feelings inside
us that rarely are given outlet in daily life. And 
when they
do come out, they can take perverse forms. It's the 
dark side.
Everyone, when he sees it, recognizes the same thing 
in himself.
It's a recognition of forces that rarely see the 
light of day.
The more civilized we get on the surface, the more 
the other
forces make their plea.

~They claim everyone was born, but I don't recall it. 
Maybe
I was having one of my blackouts.

~That's what real love amounts to- letting a person 
be what he
really is. Most people love you for who you pretend 
to be. To
keep their love, you keep pretending- performing. You 
get to
love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an 
image, an act-
and the sad thing is, people get so used to their 
image, they grow
attached to their masks. They love their chains. They 
forget all
about who they really are. And if you try to remind 
them, they
hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to 
steal their most
precious possession.

~You could say it's an accident that I was ideally 
suited for
the work I am doing. It's the feeling of a bow string
being pulled back for 22 years and suddenly being let 
go...

~I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing 
of
established order. I am interested in anything about 
revolt,
disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to 
have no
meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards 
freedom -
external freedom is a way to bring about internal 
freedom.

~I like people who shake other people up and make 
them
feel uncomfortable.

~I'd hate to think I'd stop having anything to do 
with music,
but I think that in the future, I'll tend towards an 
exclusive
film involvement.

~I get an instinctive feeling for the film media. I 
think
I'll do pretty well at it.

~I think I was just fed up with the image that had 
been
created around me, which I sometimes consciously, 
most of the
time unconsciously cooperated with. It just got too 
much for me
to really stomach and so I put an end to it in one 
glorious
evening.

~I wasted a lot of time and energy with the Miami 
trial.
About a year and a half. But I guess it was a 
valuable
experience because before the trial I had a very 
unrealistic
schoolboy attitude about the American judicial 
system. My
eyes have been opened up a bit.

~The trouble with all these busts is people I know, 
friends of
mine, think it's funny and they like to believe it's 
true and
they accept it; people who don't like me like to 
believe it
because I'm the reincarnation of everything they 
consider evil.
I get hung both ways.

~I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a 
good way
to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old
age, or OD...
I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, 
hear it,
smell it. Death is only going to happen to you once; 
I don't
want to miss it.

~I've always liked reptiles. I used to see the 
universe as
a mammoth snake, and I used to see all the people and 
objects,
landscapes, as little pictures in the facets of their 
scales.
I think peristaltic motion is the basic life 
movement.
Swallowing, digestion, the rhythms of sexual 
intercourse. We
must not forget that the lizard and the snake are 
identified
with the unconscious, with the forces of evil. 
There's some-
thing deep in the human memory that reacts very 
strongly
to reptiles. Even if you've never seen one, the snake 
embodies
everything we fear.

~I think that more than writing and music, my 
greatest talent
is that I have an instinctive knack of self-image 
propagation.
I was very good at manipulating publicity with a few 
little
phrases like 'erotic politicians'. Having grown up 
with TV
and mass magazines, I knew instinctively what people 
would
catch on to, so I dropped those little jewels here 
and there,
seemingly very innocently; of course, I was just 
calling signals.

~I guess that's what I've always wanted to do, even 
more than
being in a band, was working in films. I'd like to 
write and
direct a film of my own. There's one that's all in my 
head, but
I have a film which I made, which hasn't been seen 
very much.
It's called HWY.

~Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new 
names.
They want to divorce themselves from their 
predecessors.

~I always liked the things I read. Of course- they 
were about
me. But they were concentrating on my progenitive 
organ too
much, and weren't paying attention to the fact that I 
was
a fairly healthy young male, who also had something 
more than
the standard arms, legs, ribs, eyes and so on- had a
cerebellum, the full equipment. The press always does 
that.

~Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

~Sometimes...I like to think of the history of rock & roll like
the origin of Greek drama. That started out on the 
threshing
floors during the crucial seasons, and was originally 
a band
of acolytes dancing and singing. Then, one day, a possessed
person jumped out of the crowd and started imitating 
a god...

~I think people go to rock concerts because they 
enjoy being
in crowds. It gives them a feeling of power and 
security in
a strange way. They like to rub up against hundreds 
of other
people that are like them. It reinforces their trip. 
As a per
former then, I'm just a focus for everyone's 
attention,
because you have to have an excuse to mob together. 
Otherwise
it becomes a riot.

~I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just 
anything
to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole 
room
full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and 
think,
you're doing something.

~Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the 
truth, but
it's usually too battered with rules to be heard. We 
cripple
ourselves with lies. Most people have no idea of what 
they're
missing, our society places a supreme value on 
control, on
hiding what you feel. It mocks primitive culture and 
prides
itself on the suppression of natural instincts and 
impulses.

~I think we're the band you love to hate- it's been 
that way
from the beginning. We're universally despised, and I 
kinda
relish the whole situation. Why, I don't know: I 
think we're
on a monstrous ego-trip, and people resent it...they 
hate
us because we're so good.

~For me, it was never really an act, those so-called 
perfom-
ances. It was a life-and-death thing; an attempt to 
communicate,
to involve many people in a private world of thought. 
I no
longer feel I can best do this music through 
concerts. The
belief isn't there.

~Being onstage, being one of the central figures, I 
can
only see it from my own viewpoint, but then I 
suddenly saw
things as they really are, that I am, to a degree, 
just a
puppet, controlled by a lot of forces I understand 
only vaguely.

~I think in art, but especially in films, people are 
trying
to confirm their own existences.

~The most important kind of freedom is to be what you 
really
are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade 
in your
sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, 
and in
exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any 
large-scale
revolution until there's a personal revolution, on 
and
individual level. It's got to happen inside first. 
You can
take away a man's political freedom and you won't 
hurt him-
unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can 
destroy
him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody 
can win
it for you.

~The first time I discovered death...me and my mother 
and
father, and my grandmother and grandfather, were 
driving through
the desert at dawn. A truckload of Indians had either 
hit
another car or something- there were Indians 
scattered all over
the highway, bleeding to death. I was just a kid, so 
I had
to stay in the car while my father and grandfather 
went to
check it out. I didn't see nothing- all I saw was 
funny red
paint and people lying around, but I knew something 
was
happening, because I could dig the vibrations of the 
people
around me, and all of a sudden I realized that they 
didn't
know what was happening any more than I did. That was 
the
first time I tasted fear...and I do think, at that 
moment,
the souls of those dead Indians- maybe one or two of 
them-
were just running around, freaking out, and just 
landed in
my soul, and I was like a sponge, ready to sit there 
and
absorb it.