Burroughs's Voice Is Hard, Derisive, Inventive, Free,

Do Not Whine... Do Not Complain. Work Harder. Spend More Time Alone.

Anything Worth Having Has Its Price.

I Start A Book And I Want To Make It Perfect, Want It To Turn Every Color, Want It To Be The World. Ten Pages In, I've Already Blown It, Limited It, Made It Less, Marred It. That's Very Discouraging. I Hate The Book At That Point. After A While I Arrive At An Accommodation: Well, It's Not The Ideal, It's Not The Perfect Object I Wanted To Make, But Maybe—if I Go Ahead And Finish It Anyway—i Can Get It Right Next Time. Maybe I Can Have Another Chance.

To Have That Sense Of One's Intrinsic Worth Which Constitutes Self-respect Is Potentially To Have Everything: The Ability To Discriminate, To Love And To Remain Indifferent. To Lack It Is To Be Locked Within Oneself, Paradoxically Incapable Of Either Love Or Indifference.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. We Live Entirely By The Impression Of A Narrative Line Upon Disparate Images, The Shifting Phantasmagoria, Which Is Our Actual Experience.