Top 100 Burroughs's Quotes
#1. Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
#2. After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.
William S. Burroughs
#3. It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.
William S. Burroughs
#4. In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.
William S. Burroughs
#5. Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.
William S. Burroughs
#6. Anything that is as old as racism is in the blood line of the nation. It's not any superficial thing-that attitude is in the blood and we have to educate about it.
Nannie Helen Burroughs
#8. Should I just sit down, right here at carousel seven, and shake until somebody's arms are around me and they're saying, 'It's okay, I'm here, I'm here, come with me to the institute.
Augusten Burroughs
#9. 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
#11. But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair.
Augusten Burroughs
#12. Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.
Augusten Burroughs
#13. (1) Never give anything away for nothing.
(2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait).
(3) Always take everything back if you possibly can.
William S. Burroughs
#15. The path of the mighty beast was guided telepathically by the two people who sat in a huge saddle that was cinched to the thoat's broad back.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#16. This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It's another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn't really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am.
Augusten Burroughs
#17. Dream long enough and dream hard enough
you will come to know
dreaming can make it so ...
William S. Burroughs
#19. Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history.
William S. Burroughs
#20. Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce.
William S. Burroughs
#21. 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
#22. The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments.
William S. Burroughs
#23. Safety comes in our nearness to God, not in our distance from our enemies.
Dillon Burroughs
#24. To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter ... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
John Burroughs
#25. 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
#26. Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
William S. Burroughs
#27. The Lord watches over us every moment of every day. He is there
and He cares
about every step and every breath.
Dillon Burroughs
#28. Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy - always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups - the largest race is the Mongoloid group.
William S. Burroughs
#29. Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
William S. Burroughs
#30. Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
William S. Burroughs
#31. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
#32. Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.
William S. Burroughs
#33. The unworthies in power feel danger, like cows uneasily pawing the ground with a great Moo.
William S. Burroughs
#34. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale.
David Foster Wallace
#36. Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
William S. Burroughs
#37. Turn off the light, she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.
Augusten Burroughs
#38. 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
#39. The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
William S. Burroughs
#40. 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
#41. Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
William S. Burroughs
#42. 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
#44. The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.
William S. Burroughs
#45. My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.
William S. Burroughs
#48. Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
William S. Burroughs
#49. My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone's face while wearing goosedown mittens.
Augusten Burroughs
#50. Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.
William S. Burroughs
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. It's neat how money smells nothing like anything in the world except money, just like cardboard.
Augusten Burroughs
#54. There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.
William S. Burroughs
#55. I began to get a feeling ( ... ) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
William S. Burroughs
#57. I sat up and my mouth tasted horrible, like stale pot, beer and Cheetos. The exact combination of ingredients that had caused me to pass into unconsciousness on Natalie's floor.
Augusten Burroughs
#58. 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
#59. Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.
William S. Burroughs
#60. I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
William S. Burroughs
#62. The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.
William S. Burroughs
#63. God does not remove us from all harm; He uses harm to move us close to Him.
Dillon Burroughs
#64. Man is a political animal' said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men.
William S. Burroughs
#65. To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know.
William S. Burroughs
#66. It is a woman's reason to say I will do such a thing because I will.
Jeremiah Burroughs
#67. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers
William S. Burroughs
#68. The ears were large, flaring forward, the eyes limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light: obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond.
William S. Burroughs
#70. When we first come to faith in Christ, we often think it was simply of our own choosing. Only later do we realize we would have never taken that step of faith apart from His grace drawing us near to Him.
Dillon Burroughs
#71. 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
#73. The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children's children's children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image.
William S. Burroughs
#74. Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.
William S. Burroughs
#75. Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
William S. Burroughs
#76. Anything that can be accomplished chemically can be accomplished in other ways.
William S. Burroughs
#77. If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
William S. Burroughs
#78. It's not such a huge deal when this happens at a 7-Eleven. It's pretty huge, though, when you spend the entire job interview trying not to come across like a box of hair and you come across like a box of hair.
Augusten Burroughs
#79. They say only love can create, so who the fuck could love up a centipede? He's got more love in him than I got.
Now, killing a centipede makes me feel safer - like, one less.
William S. Burroughs
#80. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no solution. Just conflict. Only thing that can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats past and present.
William S. Burroughs
#81. When your psychiatrist forgets to look at the clock and is hanging on your every word, that's when you know, out of all his patients, you are the sickest. He
Augusten Burroughs
#82. I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me.
Augusten Burroughs
#83. The response to stress is not less time in God's Word, but more.
Dillon Burroughs
#84. You see, control can never be a means to any practical end ... It can never be a means to anything but more control ... like junk..
William S. Burroughs
#85. So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.
Augusten Burroughs
#86. There is no secret formula
only a life committed to a close walk with God.
Dillon Burroughs
#87. I don't spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowsers wand: 'Junk here!
William S. Burroughs
#88. how futile is man's poor, weak imagination by comparison with Nature's incredible genius. And
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#89. The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
William S. Burroughs
#90. In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen
William S. Burroughs
#91. 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
#92. Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
William S. Burroughs
#93. I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.
William S. Burroughs
#94. 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
#95. I think people might think, oh, I don't want to approach the big famous author because it's embarrassing, but then they think for two seconds about it and realize, this is, like, a toilet bowl reader.
Augusten Burroughs
#96. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.
William S. Burroughs
#97. I was asked: "Why did you stop writing?" I would not know any more than I would know why I started writing. Try not to be as obtuse as you are.
William S. Burroughs
#98. I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.
William S. Burroughs
#99. Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.
William S. Burroughs
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
