"The voice in The Soft Machine is talking about time. [It] slips deliberately and frequently, sometimes ironically and sometimes not . rattles off elliptical allusions, throws away joke after outrageous joke, shifts gear in mid-sentence, never falters. It is precisely this voice--complex, subtle, allusive--that is the fine thing about The Soft Machine and about Burroughs."--Joan Didion "One of the most interesting pieces of radical fiction we have."-- The Nation "[Burroughs's] great fictions [show] his superb, hard-edged satirical visions of cancerous and addictive consumerism; his elegiac and poetic invocations of sadness and dislocation; his enormous fertility of ideas and imagery." --Will Self "Out of the dirt, the excrement, the couplings, Burroughs makes a disgusting, exciting poetry."-- Sunday Times "The author, no longer raging in obscurity with his devils, has devised a technique, the Cut Up and Pemutation.

Burroughs writes, and cuts, and pastes, and adds, and recuts, repastes, rearranges by hazard."-- The New York Times Book Review "Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift."--Jack Kerouac.