I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.

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

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.