“Expediency, you see, made me artful. My total work was built on a series of continual discoveries and adjustments.”

Selected Letters of William S. Burroughs

“I made a mistake in writing my first novel: all the characters I had introduced were dead at the end of the first chapter.”

“I could get into twenty-minute shouting matches over semicolons, because every semicolon was a matter of life or death.”

“I am a mysteriously slow writer. I say “mysteriously” because there is no accounting for it.”