"Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?"

“Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!”

“Writing is fifty years behind painting.”

“I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career.”

“The Way Is Nor This Nor That.”

“I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself at the right place at the same time.”

“He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words... he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature... Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs.'”