Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.

International peace and security depend on certain taboos that are easily recognized when they are broken. It can be more important for an intervention to take place because nuclear or chemical or biological weapons are used as opposed to just measuring how many people are killed.

The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.

There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

I'm interested in the dark side of man. I'm interested in taboos and murder is the greatest taboo. Characters are fascinating in their extremity not in their happiness.

I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.