I read a lot of 'The Canterbury Tales' on my phone last year, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading.

Capitalism, in the realm of sexuality, I figure, thinks that we behave in specific ways, like a breast is always going to produce a hard-on for some product, whereas the truth is that sexuality is always a continuum, which can be characterized by reversals.

If I'm going to feel estranged and alienated and away from home I don't want anyone interrupting it to debate which berries to have in their pancakes.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

There is no right or wrong reading of Naked Lunch, though some readings are more common, and thus Burroughs commercial is not the issue.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?