I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.

For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.

[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.

Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through.

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?