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My grandmother was this amazing woman in the Dominican Republic who used to read tea leaves and palms. She would cure people in her neighborhood by going into her garden, plucking a couple of leaves, and brewing teas.

I'm very much interested in having people take herbs that make them feel good because if they do that, they'll have an experience, and they'll say, 'Oh, this is real.' This is something you take, and you don't have to go on faith, but you can feel the difference.

I remember how my dad was so into herbal solutions and health food well before that stuff became popular.

Well, I've seen a bunch of acupuncturists and one of my sister-in-laws is an herbalist. So I know a lot about alternative medicine. I don't know a lot about the practice but I know about the world.

During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.

Just look at herbal remedies. It's essentially a throwback. It's saying you go to a plant and you mush it up and you stick it in the jar and you sell it and you eat it and it's going to cure what ails you. And that's the kind of stuff that people believed in the early 19th century.

I consulted a Chinese herbalist and spent two weeks on an island off the coast of Zanzibar. I was away from any kind of contemporary technology.

My father happened to be a doctor, and though I loved and idealized him privately, professionally I never had any use for him or anyone connected with that science.

What you know about the people whom you know at all well is truly amazing, even though you have never formulated it.