I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

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

Writing is the act of saying "I," of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying "listen to me, see it my way, change your mind."

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

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.