I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no!

I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

The streets of every city in America are filled with men who would pay all the money they could lay their hands on to be transformed, even for a day, into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk all over cops, extort drinks from terrified bartenders and roar out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter.

It drops us into a vigorous current, a constant state of misguided control. The doomed generation takes a final step forward, ignoring all the signs that state the obvious, and leaps into a trip no drug known to man could ever encompass.

Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing.