Top 100 William S. Burroughs Quotes
#1. Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.
William S. Burroughs
#2. First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother.
William S. Burroughs
#3. Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce.
William S. Burroughs
#4. Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.
William S. Burroughs
#5. Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
William S. Burroughs
#6. Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning sunlight!
William S. Burroughs
#7. Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is two people because it is a statement of the impasse of dualistic universe which he has created, they have created. I think that any dualistic universe ends in Nova. Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is a kind of God. A God of stupidity, cowardice, ugliness.
William S. Burroughs
#8. You don't sell a film by saying you won't show it. There may be secrets too horrible for a man to know and keep his own sanity but that won't go down in Hollywood, Mister.
William S. Burroughs
#10. You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
William S. Burroughs
#11. He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells ...
William S. Burroughs
#12. The Orgasmic Death Gimmick is rather complicated. It could be called the whole birth-death cycle of action, persuading people that birth and death are realities.
William S. Burroughs
#13. For instance, they [The Federal Narcotics Bureau ] give out that marijuana is a harmful and habit-forming drug, and it simply isn't. They claim that you can get addicted to opiates with one shot, and you can't. They over-estimate the physical bad effects, and so forth.
William S. Burroughs
#14. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
William S. Burroughs
#15. I tried more than once to tell you, to communicate what I know. You did not or could not listen. You can not show to anyone what he has not seen.
William S. Burroughs
#16. Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
William S. Burroughs
#17. [Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
William S. Burroughs
#18. I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.
William S. Burroughs
#20. The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
William S. Burroughs
#21. England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
William S. Burroughs
#22. Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass.
William S. Burroughs
#24. I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make.
William S. Burroughs
#25. How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far.
William S. Burroughs
#27. If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.
William S. Burroughs
#29. We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
William S. Burroughs
#31. A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
William S. Burroughs
#32. The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. "Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin," as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion.
William S. Burroughs
#33. The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
William S. Burroughs
#34. Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden.
William S. Burroughs
#37. All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.
William S. Burroughs
#38. If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.
William S. Burroughs
#39. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
William S. Burroughs
#40. Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay
William S. Burroughs
#42. There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
William S. Burroughs
#43. Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
William S. Burroughs
#46. Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
William S. Burroughs
#47. The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic insanity, random events in a dying universe.
William S. Burroughs
#48. Madness is confusion of levels of fact ... Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
William S. Burroughs
#49. The figure had emerged from a lightless region where everything we have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply.
William S. Burroughs
#50. The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.
William S. Burroughs
#51. Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.
William S. Burroughs
#52. For him, conscious intent was a form of prediction, and prediction is only possible when the status quo has reason to assume it will meet no significant opposition.
William S. Burroughs
#53. If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
William S. Burroughs
#54. All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?
William S. Burroughs
#55. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
William S. Burroughs
#56. Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
William S. Burroughs
#57. There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?
William S. Burroughs
#59. Danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of
direct confrontation, you are immortal.
William S. Burroughs
#61. I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink ...
William S. Burroughs
#63. Cheat your landlord if you can
and must
but do not try to shortchange the Muse.
William S. Burroughs
#65. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier.
William S. Burroughs
#66. But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.
William S. Burroughs
#67. The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.
William S. Burroughs
#69. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.
William S. Burroughs
#70. Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
William S. Burroughs
#71. Cut word lines - Cut music lines - Smash the control images - Smash the control machine - Burn the books - Kill the priests - Kill! Kill! Kill!
William S. Burroughs
#74. In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.
William S. Burroughs
#75. We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
William S. Burroughs
#77. I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.
William S. Burroughs
#78. My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.
William S. Burroughs
#79. If, after having been in someone's presence, you feel like you've lost a quart of plasma - avoid that presence. No one likes to hear the word "vampire" used around here... it's kind of bad for our public image.
William S. Burroughs
#80. Brummel would rush upon his plate & gulp down a roast in such a revolting manner that the other guests complained they were nauseated and Brummel had to be fed in his room ... ... ... .
William S. Burroughs
#84. There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.
William S. Burroughs
#85. I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.
William S. Burroughs
#87. A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.
William S. Burroughs
#88. The old junky has found a vein ... blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower ... he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.
William S. Burroughs
#89. Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
William S. Burroughs
#91. The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
William S. Burroughs
#92. There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.
William S. Burroughs
#93. Know who I am? ... 'Good Bye Mister' is my name ... 'Wind and Dust' is my name ... 'Never Happened' is my name ...
William S. Burroughs
#94. If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.
William S. Burroughs
#95. Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.
William S. Burroughs
#96. Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you.
William S. Burroughs
#97. He remembers his fathers last words: Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shit house. And swear to me you'll never wear a lawman's badge.
William S. Burroughs
#99. As I was walking past Tony Pastor's I saw Pat, the lesbian bouncer, throw a drunken young sailor out into the street. The sailor said, "That place is full of fucking queers." He swung at the air and nearly fell on his face, then he staggered away, muttering to himself.
William S. Burroughs
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