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.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

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

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.