I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.

My witness is the empty sky.

Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.