I am always looking for some clue, some easily missed sign that might just be the missing piece in the puzzle.

That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.

I like to focus on the varieties of paper, the different sizes and watermarks, evidence perhaps of what was typed when and sometimes where and by whom.

A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing.

I have really been fortunate, incredibly privileged, to have done so much editorial work, and I would love to do more. But just as my editions have tried to balance the familiar with the new, the commercial with the scholarly, so too I have to admit that I don't want to do editing for the sake of it, and some possible projects would be of uncertain value to me.

It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole.

I was suckered in by the myth of the man [ William Burroughs] as much as by his work.