"It’s fashionable to read ‘Naked Lunch,’ proclaim Burroughs as a genius, sometimes dip into ‘Junky,’ and forget the rest. The truth is that Burroughs’ best novels were the ones he wrote in the later years of his life, like ‘The Western Lands,’ and this beautiful work."

"Full disclosure: I was the acquiring editor of this book for Pantheon, and back in 1999 I pitched it to the Random House sales force as ‘The “Ulysses” of comics.’ I think that description holds up just fine 18 years and just as many re-printings later."

"I’d been after this for years, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a neon acid trip of a movie. Incredible soundtrack as well. I think there’s a line where incredibly stylized movies can achieve an emotional sense that you can’t get to through documentary or traditional Hollywood styles."

"I saw this when I was fourteen. Saga the tomboy is one of my favorite characters. Falling in love with boys while wanting to be like them is how I spent my childhood, and the 1950s sports clothes dictated what I wore for the next ten years."

"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,’ Hughes wrote nearly 100 years ago. ‘We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.’ We are all imperfectly human, and these imperfections are also markers of human equality"

"Obviously I read this when I was very young, with Heaven and Hell, and then years later, a friend of mine in Paris—a rare book dealer and musician—turned me on to all his other books, and I was just knocked flat. They are so good."