“Do you know Herbert Huncke?” Allen Ginsberg asked. “He’s the oldest living junkie in New York, and an old sidekick of Burroughs and Kerouac”

“Their first conversation of any length took place at a party earlier this year, and there they talked and carried on like old friends.”

“Greed,” agree most of my friends. “Greed sums up the decade.” I guess I’d add the things that flow out of greed­ — disease, hunger, and fear — because this is what Reaganomics looked like when it finally arrived in the real world.

"Nothing quite like the beat demimonde exists anymore, not with the same literary élan, the same desperate vitality. Being a poor New York writer or painter has become too expensive — or too crushing — to permit such animated congregation"