William S. Burroughs? Kenneth Turan? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: The transgressive Beat Generation author William Burroughs once wrote something like the following:
I am not innarested in your horrible disease.
I recall reading this many years ago. The word “interested” was deliberately written with the nonstandard spelling “innarested”. Maybe my memory is flawed because I have been unable to trace this statement. Would you please help me to find a precise citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1959 William S. Burroughs published “Naked Lunch” which included the following pertinent passage spoken by a character in the novel. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
“Sick people disgust me already. When some citizen start telling me about his cancer of the prostate or his rotting septum make with that purulent discharge I tell him: ‘You think I am innarested to hear about your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.’”
QI believes that the statement in the inquiry was derived from the two highlighted sentences in “Naked Lunch” via an imperfect memory.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1977 film critic Kenneth Turan published in “The Washington Post” a harshly negative evaluation of a film by Dennis Hopper. While describing his distaste Turan credited Burroughs with the misremembered quotation:2
Ditto for Dennis Hopper’s dreary, muddled, self-indulgent “The Last Movie,” which aggravated me so much when I saw it that I threw a raw carrot at the screen. (I missed.) As William Burroughs once wrote in a somewhat different context, “I am not innarested in your horrible disease.”
The article by Turan was reprinted in other newspapers such as the “Poughkeepsie Journal” of New York.3 Thus, the inexact quotation achieved further distribution.
In 1980 “Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts” published the essay “Mariner and Wedding Guest in William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’” by Anthony Channell Hilfer. The piece included a close match to the target quotation in the novel. The word “about” was inadvertently omitted:4
Sick people disgust me already. When some citizen starts telling me about his cancer of the prostate or his rotting septum make with that purulent discharge I tell him ‘You think I am innarested to hear your horrible old condition. I am not innarested at all.’ (122)
In 2009 the 50th Anniversary edition of “Naked Lunch” with restored text was published. The pertinent passage in this updated edition was unchanged.5
In conclusion, William S. Burroughs deserves credit for the quotation he wrote in “Naked Lunch” in 1959. A compressed version of the quotation was incorrectly attributed to Burroughs by Kenneth Turan in 1977.
Images Notes: Picture of a typewriter from Yusuf Evli at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Josh Drexler whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Drexler located the citation in “The Washington Post”.
- 1959 Copyright, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, Section: Ordinary Men and Women, Quote Page 122, Grove Press Inc., New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1977 June 12, The Washington Post, Section: Style, Movies: ‘Insipid Pandering’ by Kenneth Turan, Quote Page D1, Column 6, Washington, D.C. (ProQuest) ↩︎
- 1977 June 26, Poughkeepsie Journal, Movies by Kenneth Turan (Washington Post writer), Quote Page 14B, Column 2 and 3,Poughkeepsie, New York. (ProQuest) ↩︎
- 1980 Summer, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Mariner and Wedding Guest in William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” by Anthony Channell Hilfer, Start Page 252, Quote Page 261, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan. (ProQuest) ↩︎
- 2009, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, Edition: 50th Anniversary: The Restored Text, Editors: James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, Section: Ordinary Men and Women, Quote Page 103, Fourth Estate, London. (Verified with scans) ↩︎