When asked what he thought of William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett apparently replied, "He's a writer." Reading the obits last summer, it was obvious that William Seward Burroughs, writer or not, had certainly succeeded in remaining an enigma even in death. No one, they confirmed, owned more than a piece of the jigsaw, and assembling the thing always left one fragment unknown. You could call it the drugs, the homosexuality, or his wife's tragic death, but whatever it was, it has sustained - even nurtured - the legend. And, as the Mandelsonian millennium looms, any reasonable list of the centurial greats (i.e. not that recent Radio 3 travesty) will have to include him. He was a writer.

There are, perhaps, two ways into what Ballard called the great mythographer. First, the books themselves, in all their exaggerated, delicate, scabrous and scatological beauty. It's an obvious thing to say, but Naked Lunch will still be an extraordinary book tomorrow, let alone almost forty years ago.

And then there are the interviews. For, although Burroughs remained an intensely private man, he was seldom known to be shy of a live mic. Think of 1969's The Job for one, and Victor Bockris' lavishly illustrated (the closest WSB ever got to Hello!) With William Burroughs for another. This essential revised edition inevitably bears the wistful air of memorial, but fortunately plays host to little editorial meddling in the search for post-mortemismal "truth".

These interviews were recorded after WSB's mid-70s return to the States, but before his move out to Kansas. Installed in secure, windowless New York hideaway The Bunker, he received the great and good from far and wide, from old compatriot Allen Ginsberg (whose death last April seemed to have made Burroughs' own inevitable), to Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Tennessee Williams, Mick Jagger and Terry Southern. And Andy Warhol. The Pop supremo pops up again and again, his fascinated randomness providing one of Burroughs' best foils - the intellectual antithesis of an equally impressive Susan Sontag.

To review the book, however, is simply to be left cutting-up great quotes and stories. WSB and Southern picking through a shopping bag of prescription drugs looking for the word "pain" because, they decide, it's narcotic code: "Anything that won't cook up, we'll eat... They're saying chew one at a time, and I'm saying cook up eight!" Dressing to go out, WSB loads up his cane, tube of teargas, and a blackjack: "I don't feel dressed without them." WSB justifying to Bockris the hours spent sobbing over the "nuclear catastrophe" that would "destroy" his beloved cats. Here he is talking about his uncle's time as Hitler's PR. There, asked if he believes in an afterlife, responding, "How do you know you're not already dead?"

Bockris' editing can be disjointed and infuriating, but, like 1993's collected letters, this is largely undiluted stuff. Just don't come seeking after answers: "The past only exists in some record of it, right? There are no facts. We don't know how much of history is completely fiction."