Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

The doctor was also a concert violinist, a mathematician, a chess master, and a Doctor of International Jurisprudence with license to practice in the lavatories of the Hague.

You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them?

(Latah is a condition occurring in Southeast Asia. Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.)

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.…

I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets.

No one ever looked at anyone else because of the strict law against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise.

Homosexuality is a political crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt rejection of its basic tenets.

‘How in the fuck should I know? I’m a scientist. A pure scientist. Just get them outa here. I don’t hafta look at them is all. They constitute an albatross.’

‘And what do you conclude from that?’ ‘Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing observation.’