This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.

Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.