Daniel Older: Your books, since The Ticket That Exploded especially, are no longer ‘novels’;  a breaking up of novelistic form is noticeable in the Naked Lunch. Towards what end or goal is this break-up heading?

William Burroughs: That’s very difficult to say. I think that the novelistic form is probably outmoded and that we may look forward perhaps to a future in which people do not read at all or read only illustrated books and magazines or some abbreviated form of reading matter. To compete with television and photo magazines, writers will have to develop more precise techniques producing the same effect on the reader as a lurid action photo.

DO: What separates Naked Lunch from Nova Express? What is the most important evolution between these two books?

WB: I would say the introduction of the cut-up and fold-in method which occurred between Naked Lunch and Nova Express is undoubtedly the most important evolution between these books. In Nova Express I think I get further from the conventional novel form than I did in Naked Lunch. I don’t feel that Nova Express is in any sense a wholly successful book.

DO: You wrote: “Writing is fifty years behind painting.” How can the gap be closed?

WB: I did not write that. Mr Brion Gysin, who is both painter and writer, wrote “Writing is fifty years behind painting.” Why this gap? Because the painter can touch and handle his medium and the writer cannot. The writer does not know what words are. He only deals with abstractions from the source point of words. The painter’s ability to touch and handle his medium led to montage techniques sixty years ago. It is hoped that the extension of cut-up techniques will lead to more precise verbal experiments, closing this gap and giving a whole new dimension to writing. These techniques can show the writer what words are and put him in tactile communication with his medium. This is turn could lead to a precise science of words and show how certain word combinations produce certain effects on the human nervous system.

The Job: Interview with William Burroughs by Daniel Odier, Jonathan Cape 1970 [re-issue / review / excerpt]