danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.

When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

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

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].