Top 100 Quotes About William Burroughs
#1. The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.
Jerry Stahl
#2. I was suckered in by the myth of the man [ William Burroughs] as much as by his work.
Oliver Harris
#3. Authors and artists are still afraid of breaking away as far as [William Burroughs] did ... And he did it in the 50s!
Yony Leyser
#4. I was his "little girl with the William Burroughs mind," his "secret fairy," "female Frank Zappa" and "window onto a magical world." He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.
Jalina Mhyana
#5. Oh my god, this is so weird! I'm in space, talking to a giant insect. This is like ... I don't know ... William Burroughs or something!
Gavin G. Smith
#6. I knew William Burroughs really well, and I was always star struck being around him. I adored him.
Patti Smith
#7. [Allen] Ginsberg totally helped that out. He was the best sales person. He was the most pop. They are still shocking and relevant, especially [William] Burroughs.
Yony Leyser
#8. Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.
Patti Smith
#9. When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.
Patti Smith
#10. Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.
William Gibson
#11. After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.
William S. Burroughs
#12. Unquestionably, this drug is is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in Naked Lunch directly to the use of cannabis.
William Burroughs
#13. It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.
William S. Burroughs
#14. In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.
William S. Burroughs
#15. Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.
William S. Burroughs
#16. We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse
William S. Burroughs
#17. 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
#19. (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
#21. Dream long enough and dream hard enough
you will come to know
dreaming can make it so ...
William S. Burroughs
#23. 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
#24. Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce.
William S. Burroughs
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
William S. Burroughs
#31. Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
William S. Burroughs
#32. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
#33. 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
#34. The unworthies in power feel danger, like cows uneasily pawing the ground with a great Moo.
William S. Burroughs
#36. Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
William S. Burroughs
#37. 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
#38. The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
William S. Burroughs
#39. 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
#40. Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
William S. Burroughs
#41. 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
#43. The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.
William S. Burroughs
#44. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.
William S. Burroughs
#56. I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
William S. Burroughs
#58. The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.
William S. Burroughs
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers
William S. Burroughs
#62. 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
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.
William S. Burroughs
#68. Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
William S. Burroughs
#69. Anything that can be accomplished chemically can be accomplished in other ways.
William S. Burroughs
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen
William S. Burroughs
#77. 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
#78. Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
William S. Burroughs
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.
William S. Burroughs
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.
William S. Burroughs
#87. There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.
William S. Burroughs
#88. 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
#89. Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
William S. Burroughs
#90. [Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
William S. Burroughs
#91. I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.
William S. Burroughs
#92. I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: "New Mexico, land of enchantment."
William S. Burroughs
#93. 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
#94. I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?
William S. Burroughs
#96. There is not much to say about Burrough's writing. It consists of semiliterate ravings by a very sick mind, a kaleidoscope or surrealistic depictions of drug-taking, violent, often misogynistic fantasy, and sexual depravity.
Roger Kimball
#97. How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
William S. Burroughs
#98. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs
#99. We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.
William S. Burroughs
#100. The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government ...
William S. Burroughs
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