Sept 16, 1956: I have no compulsion to write or to do anything except when I am possessed by routines, which can happen anytime. A lot of the time I just sit blank and narcotized letting sensations flow through me. I have a feeling that I might turn into somebody else, that I am losing my outlines.

Oct 13, 1956: I have entered a period of change more drastic than adolescence or early childhood. I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all. I can’t take time to go into all my mystic experiences which I have whenever  I walk out the door. There is something special about Tanger.

Oct 29, 1956: What I am writing now supersedes, in fact makes obsolete, anything I have written hitherto[....] I am really writing Interzone now, not writing about it.

Dec 20, 1965. I will send along 100 pages of Interzone, it is coming so fast I can’t hardly get it down, and shakes me like a great black wind through the bones ...

Jan 23, 1957. Interzone is coming like dictation. I can’t keep up with it.

Jan 28, 1957. Now my power’s really coming ...

Feb 14, 1957. Since sending MS. have written about fifty pages more, wilder than what you have. This is almost automatic writing. I often sit high on hash for as long as six hours typing at top speed.

August 28, 1957. I have always felt that the MS. To date was in a sense notes for a novel rather than the novel itself. This novel is now taking shape faster than I can write down.

Sep 20, 1957. As regards MS., I think any attempt at chronological arrangement extremely ill-advised[...] The MS. in present form does not hold together as a novel for the simple reason that it is not a novel. It is a number of connected – by theme – but separate short pieces. My feeling is that it will eventually grow into several novels all interlocking and taking place simultaneously as in a majoun dream. But I do not see organization as a problem.

Oct 28th, 1957. If anyone finds this form confusing, it is because they are accustomed to the historical novel form, which is a three-dimensional chronology of events happening to someone already, for purposes of the novel, dead. That is the usual novel has happened. This novel is happening.

The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption.

Nov 10, 1957. I do nothing but work.... Given up liquor entirely. Writing the narrative now, which comes in great hunks faster than I can get it down. Changes in my psyche profound and basic. I feel myself not the same person.

Oct 10 1958. Brion Gysin living next door[....] He has undergone similar conversion to mine and doing GREAT painting[....] I see in his painting the psychic landscape of my own work. He is doing in painting what I try to do in writing. He regards his painting as a hole in the texture of so-called ‘reality’, through which he is exploring an actual place existing in outer space. That is, he moves into the painting and through it, his life and sanity at stake when he paints.

Late July 1959. Fact is I have become a megalomaniac, but with one essential difference and advantage. I have been outside. I have come up from the area of total humiliation and failure, climbed up cell by cell with a million set-backs and debacles.

William Burroughs, Letters vol. 1