Naked Lunch Quotes

Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar.

“I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body—after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death…”

The Vigilante is prosecuted in Federal Court under a lynch bill and winds up in a Federal Nut House specially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact of objects… washstand… door… toilet… bars… there they are… this is it… all lines cut… nothing beyond… Dead End… And the Dead End in every face…

Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long.

But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can’t see it, you don’t know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street—every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV.

And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down.

“The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”

“Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn’t have it. So who don’t got it? Junkies don’t got it. Oh, incidentally, there’s an area in Bolivia with no psychosis. Right sane fold in them hills. Like to get in there, me, before it is loused up by literacy, advertising, TV and drive-ins.”

“And why don’t junkies got schizophrenia? Don’t know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn’t fed. No one can ignore heroin withdrawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.”

“Are homosexuals classified as deviants?”

“No. Remember the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt homosexuality. A functioning police state needs no police. Homosexuality does not occur to anyone as conceivable behavior… Homosexuality is a political crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt rejection of its basic tenets.”

Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner.

Look down at my filthy trousers, haven’t been changed in months… The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood… I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body—a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible—the Invisible Man…

Junkies have no shame… They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido… The junky’s shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido… The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader.

“What the Mariner actually says is not important… He may be rambling, irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something happens to the Wedding Guest like happens in psychoanalysis when it happens if it happens.”

In fact, the Sollubi are subject to become wealthy and arrogant and lose their native vileness.

“And let me take this opportunity to state that I am a reputable scientist, not a charlatan, a lunatic, or a pretended worker of miracles… I never claimed that Iris could subsist exclusive on photosynthesis… I did not say she could breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen—I confess I have been tempted to experiment being of course restrained by my medical ethics…”

“Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind., until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet the needs of people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.)

“I got the health!... All the health! Enough health for the whole world, the whole fuckin world!! I cure everybody!”

He prospered and proliferated, flooding the world with cut medicines and cheap counterfeit goods of every variety. Adulterated shark repellent, cut antibiotics, condemned parachutes, stale antivenin, inactive serums and vaccines, leaking lifeboats.

“…You see control can never be a means to any practical end… It can never be a means to anything but more control… Like junk…”

The Sender is not a human individual… It is The Human Virus.

(All viruses are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence… They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis, etc. So every species has a Master Virus: Deteriorated Image of that species.)

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell… Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup—mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor’s level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?)

In the cab I realized what had happened… I had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso… Locked out… Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection… The Heat was off me from here on out… relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past […].

I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…

Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book […] …

How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall… Doors that only open in Silence… Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse…

The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises […]