I could see all these social trends, with an entertainment culture that thrived on violence and sensation and a rootless urban and suburban population with nothing to do other than play with their own psychopathic fantasies.
I wanted to go back along that road to discover what made us what we are, and water was the central image of the past.
A pity.
Celebrity is a unique element in the 20th-century consciousness, simply because we live and breathe in a media landscape.
I generally begin a book with a large sheaf of notes, covering everything from the main themes to the details of the setting.
Chirico denounced his early paintings but secretly continued to make copies of them, and then in due course denounced his own fakes.
As a child you can't see grown-ups under extreme stress without learning something about human nature.
These days we don't notice other people's selfishness until we're on the receiving end ourselves.
So people may go through their whole lifetime wanting but not having a child.
You were a great fan of threesomes.
I think if Borges were published for the first time now, people would say it's far too literary and too complicated.
I based one or two -- not many -- short stories of mine on dreams.
It's all part of the con, isn't it?
Two glorious film books about the baddest of the Hollywood bad boys.
He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
Is there any mechanism known by which the simultaneous hypnosis of large groups of people could occur?
Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city, whose vast populations are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.
Kafka may be the most important writer of the twentieth century, far more important than James Joyce.
Now people really aren't interested in the future any longer.
In the years leading up to the abolition of censorship in the late Sixties, filmmakers and writers and artists were all pushing against those barriers.
Jacopetti's Mondo Cane series of documentary films enjoyed a huge vogue in the 1960s.
Whatever its shortcomings, the Hollywood film has managed to plug itself directly into the limbic system of the planetary brain, the power-centre of our most visceral emotions, bypassing the frontal lobes altogether.
It's like a strange cross between a Conceptual Art installation and a nightclub.
Nothing is true.
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us.
They seem to provide some sort of grit which helps us to digest the business of being alive.
Our greatest evolution may occur when we have long since discarded our biological identity and become computers, which are much more enduring and capable of being endlessly duplicated if anything goes wrong.
You can do all the housework in five minutes if you don't make a fetish of it.
Naked Lunch was a grenade tossed into the sherry party of English fiction, a terrorist novel that was visionary and deranged, and written in a language of its own.
