Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.

I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are.

Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect.