Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

‘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.’

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.

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

(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.)

Junk is a pain-killer, it also kills the pain and pleasure implicit in awareness.

(A simopath – the technical name for this disorder escapes me – is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.)

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

A functioning police state needs no police.

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.