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“... what happens next. This episode is very funny in its grossness, a sort of realist version of William Burroughs’s talking arsehole routine. But it is also, like the talking arsehole routine, much more than merely funny. As I have said already, one of the most exciting things about Welsh’s book is the way it draws you right inside a community of ...”

“... a way of subverting the words of the parents, the authorised version, the authoritarian text. Like Burroughs said, it was a way of destroying the word-lines, storming the reality studio. It was a way of escaping the double-binds imposed by the structures of family and society – sexual, textual, ontological. Who am I? What is the meaning of ‘I’? What kind ...”

“... did not sleep. 5.3. That moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of their fork, as William S. Burroughs said of celebrity. 15.1. See me leaving you better hang your head and cry, she liked songs like that. Honkytonk influence. 16.3. All of her leapt before her eyes. 8.1. They worried about this and kept ...”

“... are pictured with their white, establishment collaborators T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson. It’s no wonder that Portland Place seemed the world’s omphalos. Sandhu also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great London rogues of the ...”

“... He wasn’t going to pick up a hard-core following or sell over the long term like Guy Debord or William Burroughs. He had no devoted readership and little chance of remaining in print for long, let alone being republished in thirty or forty years’ time. In short, a typical midlist author. Is this sour grapes talking? Who knows? It is certainly true ...”

“... early. In his autobiography Without Stopping (1972) – a self-portrait so unrevealing that William Burroughs renamed it Without Telling – Bowles describes some of the ruses and deceits he evolved so as to avoid the wrath of his near-psychotic father, Claude Bowles, whose methods of child-rearing seem to have derived from ancient ...”

“... nicks the jelly, it’s all commandingly impersonal. The servicing of ‘the soft machine’ (as William Burroughs called the body) proceeds to anaesthetising muzak, and tomorrow or the next day my mother, only a little sore, will start to see the world again through her new synthetic lens. For me, there will just be a faint twinge, thinking how this ...”

“... been understood by those who use and abuse them. In his introduction to The Naked Lunch (1959), William Burroughs tickertapes: ‘Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to ...”

“... course, exactly how events and memory both proceed: associatively, digressing, jolting, looping. William Burroughs makes the same point when discussing his cut-up technique: ‘Take a walk down a city street … You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of ...”

“... about animal rights, the purity of hunting and the wide open spaces. Indeed he does resemble, as William Burroughs once wrote of his own visage, ‘one of them sheep-killing dogs’. He and his kind hate the cities and the city-dwellers, especially those cities that have become sinks of immigration and race-mixing and alien religions.Clinton’s second ...”

“... Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ...”

“... to that of You Can’t Win, Jack Black’s crim chapbook from 1926, which introduced the jejune William Burroughs to the outlaw lifestyle. The Badge is a breathlessly ingenuous account of Los Angeles’s competitive and notoriously corrupt law enforcement agencies in the 1940s and 1950s. Describing the last hours of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short – the ...”

“... to me were: (1) writing is writing and (2) learn how to cook. ‘Are you a human or a robot?’ William Burroughs asked him before they could start working on a (still unproduced) screenplay about the gangster Dutch Schulz. ‘What are your intentions?’ Harrison asked my father when he first came to look at the apartment in Charles Lane. He was one ...”

“... between himself and Mailer, himself and Capote, himself and Tennessee Williams, or himself and William Buckley. Rather, we learn, not without preceding markers but in many ways for the first time, about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between ...”

“... that he seems to have defined in contrast to science fiction, on the one hand, and the work of William Burroughs, on the other. There are several (scornful) references in this volume to the likes of Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, but only a single passing mention of Beckett (who had his own concept of inner space), and nothing at all about ...”