I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

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

I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape

Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.