Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.

California: The west coast of Iowa.

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.