"Burroughs doesn't interest me at all as a novelist; his experimental, psychedelic stories have always bored me, so much that I don't think I've ever been able to read one. But Junky, the first book he wrote, a factual and autobiographical account of how he became a drug addict and how his addiction to drugs -- free choice augmenting what was already doubtless a certain proclivity -- made him a willing slave, furnishes an accurate description of what I believe to be the literary vocation, of the utter interdependence of the writer and his work and the way the latter feeds on the former, on all he is and all he does or does not do."
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Novelists from the United StatesAcademics from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPoets from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to A Young Novelist (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), transl. Natasha Wimmer (1997, translation 2002)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
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William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II (5 February 1914 – 2 August 1997), more commonly known as William S. Burroughs, was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. He was a central member of the Beat Generation and an avant-garde author who influenced popular culture as well as literature. In 1984 he was elected
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