Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.

I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day.

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

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.

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.