When you lose someone, a whole lot of perfectly normal circumstances suddenly take on different meaning. You see it in a different light. You wonder if they knew. I wondered. Doctors have told me that people do have a sense of their own approaching death.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

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

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.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.