James Toback

James Toback is an American screenwriter and film director.
 * "It's the lingering memory of my LSD flip-out in 1965, when I was 19 and a sophomore at this august institution of learning. Although I was doing well at Harvard, an undergraduate who 'had everything going for him,' I knew that my drug consumption was taking over my life. I couldn't get through the morning without getting high. I would roll out of bed, brush my teeth, maybe smoke a joint laced with hash."


 * The antidote for this lowly dependency? LSD!


 * "I went to Switzerland and got it from the Sanders Laboratory, and I put it in sugar cubes. I felt, having read Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that I was going to the outer edge of my consciousness. Why live in a box when I could live without limits? And this would cure me, paradoxically, of my drug entrapment, of this embarrassing, petty enslavement.


 * "I did go way out, but I didn't realize I couldn't go back. This was two years after Leary, and I had taken the largest dose ever to that time!"


 * For the first nine hours, Toback felt ecstatic. But his acid trip dragged on and on and on. For eight days.


 * "There's no way of expressing through words what happened. The self left, and the self is tied to language. The odds were that I would commit suicide, gladly blow my brains out on a bridge and go into the Charles. But what if I did that and still existed afterward? If you had guaranteed my death, I'd have grabbed it." http://www.geraldpeary.com/interviews/stuv/toback.html