If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Well, "disgusting" doesn't refer to the books but to the subjective reaction of the person making the complaint. I don't think that anything is disgusting per se. These words "disgusting" and "filthy," etc., have prevented us from undertaking any scientific experimentation in sexual matters.

[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.