Kerouac (editing Naked Lunch): Bill, what is all this stuff about young naked boys being hanged in limestone caves? Burroughs: No idea. I know I'm some kind of interplanetary agent but I don't think my signals are decoding properly.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous ha…

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfatho…

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make somet…

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter,…