You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

[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.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.