Quotes from or about authors, TV personalities, and people connected with a variety of media
Robert Graves - author and scholar
Life With The Goddess
Blake Morrison
Independent 2 July 1995
ONE OF the oddest moments in the long career of Robert Graves (1895-1985) was his election as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1961. Here, fittingly honoured, was a fine English gentleman-poet, author of I, Claudius, The White Goddess and Goodbye to All That, a First World war veteran now passing into old age (he had just had a serious prostate operation) yet enjoying such celebrity there were even rumours he might win the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, here was a batty exile of 66 to whom the Sixties were just beginning to happen: Graves had recently got into Sufism, loved eating magic mushrooms, was an advocate of LSD (in one Oxford lecture, he even gave students the address of a Bromley chemist where they could get hold of it), and since 1930 had lived in Dey, Mallorca, increasingly a refuge for artists, dropouts, hippies and Beats, some of whom - the women, anyway - he had taken as lovers.****************************************************************************************************************
J. G. Ballard - Sci-fi and speculative fiction authorI was a passive smoker of a good deal of cannabis, and once took LSD, completely unaware of the strength of a single dose. This was a disastrous blunder that opened a vent of hell and confirmed me as a life long whiskey drinker.
From: Miracles of Life: J. G. Ballard, 4th Estate, 2007
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Helen Mirren - Actress
In the Seventies Helen Mirren lived for a time on an upper class commune where drugs were widely used. She took LSD there for the first and last time. On the Jonathan Ross show in September 2007 she told viewers the trip was initially wonderful but turned bad later... The following is taken from the Daily Mail, which also published photos of Mirren on her LSD trip. 'The 62-year-old actress told interviewer Jonathan Ross: "I'd just taken a tab of acid – my first and last tab of acid, I can assure you – and was heading off into the fields and thinking, 'I'm not quite sure what's going to happen next'. 'And then, you know, the acid hit shortly after that and it was terrifying.' She asked Ross: 'I don't know if you've ever taken acid?" When he said he had not, she continued: Well don't. I mean, I don't know how people can take it time after time. 'I had the most wonderful time on it – it was wonderful, partly because my good friend came up to me just as the world was refracting and said, 'Don't worry Hel, it's gonna be fine. Just let go and enjoy it and it'll be fine,' and I did. 'He sort of saved me and I had a fantastic time. But it's too much, it's too much.' Ross asked if the good part of the experience outweighed the bad. Dame Helen replied: 'No actually, such a good time that I didn't want to do it again. I thought, 'That was great, that was wonderful.' "But it was very, very extreme and, you know, you could see the danger in it.
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Lynne Franks - P.R. Guru
'Why do we still go to Glastonbury and not sit around knitting for our grandchildren? We formed a new paradigm, a lifestyle motivated around music and fashion and community,' says Lynne Franks, the PR guru (born 1948). 'I think it was LSD. Not that I personally used it, but it had a huge effect on us and on our philosophy.'
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article726759.ece
********************************************************************************************************************************************** Martin Amis - Novelist (in conversation with Will Self)
WS: No, liquor isn't a working drug. I wrote Cock & Bull entirely on hash. Smoking all day, every day, in Morocco. That's a very different ambience. In England I wouldn't finish a paragraph on dope. But in Dead Babies your evocation of the drug-saturated consciousness is exact. MA: Yes, that reflected the terror engendered by four encounters with LSD during my last year at Oxford. Two of the trips were nice and two were not.
www.nigelberman.co.uk/feature1_28.htm - 23k
********************************************************************************************************************************************** Alan Moore - Author, Comic Book writer & Magician
'At the age of 17 I became one of the world's most inept LSD dealers. The problem with being an LSD dealer, if you're sampling your own product, is your view of reality will probably become horribly distorted. And you may believe you have supernatural powers and you are completely immune to any form of retaliation and prosecution, which is not the case.'
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7307303.stm
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Stephen Fry - Author, humourist and TV presenter
I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake that only makes sense when there is some LSD swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean.
LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.
Stephen Fry
Arrow 2004
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Lynne Franks - P.R. Guru
'Why do we still go to Glastonbury and not sit around knitting for our grandchildren? We formed a new paradigm, a lifestyle motivated around music and fashion and community,' says Lynne Franks, the PR guru (born 1948). 'I think it was LSD. Not that I personally used it, but it had a huge effect on us and on our philosophy.'
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article726759.ece
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Bruce Parry - TV adventurer
This quote isn't about LSD exactly but the relevance to both LSD and the psychedelic experience generally is obvious. Bruce obviously knows what he's talking about!
'I have had drug experiences that have changed my life for the better, but it all depends on the set and setting. All drugs are dangerous and all drugs are poisons. Certain societies are able to deal with that because they have generations of experience. I've done ayahuasca and igogaine, but I've done it with the right people at the right time. It would have been almost impossible for it to go wrong. I've done three-day trips where I've not even touched the ground - I've been carried aloft. The whole village spends days preparing for these parties so no one gets tripped out by two kids having a fight in the corner. Two kids doing acid in a London flat is not a good idea.'
The Word, issue 69, November 2008, p. 40
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