William S. Burroughs Quotes:

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Naked Lunch: The Restored Text”, p.180, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Inspirational, Crazy, Caring, Self Care, No Stress

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.

source: - "The War Universe". Grand Street, No. 37, 1991.

Topics: Gun, People, Shooting, Pro Gun, Right To Bear Arms

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

Topics: Cat, Pet, Doe, Cat Love, Cat Dog

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.

Topics: Real, Trying, Danger

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Topics: Travel, Math, Science, Space Travel, Tadpoles

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

Topics: Black, Magic, Casual, Black Magic

If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

Topics: Anemia, Needs, Like You, Pernicious, Plasma

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'

source: - William S. Burroughs (1993). “The Adding Machine: Selected Essays”, p.125, Arcade Publishing

Topics: Funny, Hilarious, Witty, Funny Good Morning, Outer Space

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

Topics: Military, Gun, People

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

Topics: Memories, Elephants, Long

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Topics: Change, Believe, Raw Materials, Drastic, Drastic Change

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

Topics: Dog, Cat, Thinking, Mayans

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change

Topics: Real, Artist, Mind, Legislators

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Topics: Change, Art, Real

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

Topics: One Day

Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

Topics: Art, Writing, Pages

Time is what death needs to grow people in.

Topics: Time, People, Needs

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?

Topics: Bystanders, Firsts, Innocent

Language is a virus from outer space.

Topics: Space, Viruses, Language, Outer Space

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

Topics: Children, Boys, Yellow, Gazelles, Mayfair

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

Topics: Photography, Desire, Facts

Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.

Topics: Country, Mind, Thanks

The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest...

Topics: Book, Discovery, Media

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.

Topics: Fear, Men, Nuts

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

Topics: Alive, Panic, Realization, Sudden Realization

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

Topics: Writing, Psychics, Stories

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

Topics: Needs, Grows, Time Of Need

Too perfect to be sexually attractive.

source: - William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (2001). “Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs”, p.220, Grove Press

Topics: Perfect, Attractive, Sexually

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

Topics: Heart, Feelings, Stills, Old Feelings

Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.

Topics: Love, Heartbreak, Haunting

Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.

Topics: Change, Trying, Muse, Landlord, Great Writing

For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it: No context ... like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.

Topics: Dream, Morning, Simple, Stuffed Animal

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

Topics: Clients, Junk, Doe

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…

Topics: Dream, Real, Home, Waking Life

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

Topics: Burroughs, Grows

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

Topics: Pain, Mean, Writing, Miss You So Much, I Miss You So Much

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

Topics: Psychics, Junk, Relief, Hypothalamus, Libido

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

Topics: Art, Philosophy, Independent

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.

Topics: War, Games, May, Winner And Loser, Sith

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

Topics: Past, Spain

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

Topics: Spending Time, Lost, Feels, Plasma

Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.

Topics: Agency, Commodity, Danger, Intelligence Agencies, Stuntman

We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse

Topics: Leader, Insane, Faces

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary-it's always imaginary-world in which I would like to live.

Topics: Writing, Creating, Islands, Imaginary World

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.

Topics: Mother, Teacher, Second Chance, Mother Nature, No Second Chances

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.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Order, Bad Writing

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.

Topics: Magic, Painting, Changed

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

Topics: Real, Impact, World

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

Topics: Advice, Firsts, Intestines

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.

Topics: Past, Half, Symbiosis, Sneer, Pasteur

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises. Don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work ... and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

source: - "Patti Smith: Advice to the Young". Patti Smith's interview with Christian Lund at the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, vimeo.com. August 24, 2012.

Topics: Successful, Names, Worry

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.

Topics: Character, Style, Prisoner

As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'

Topics: Junk, Watches

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

Topics: Dream, Moving, America

Paranoia is just having the right information.

Topics: Information, Paranoia

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..

Topics: Mean, Junk, Ends

Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.

Topics: Law, Asking Questions, Liberty

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Topics: Book, Writing, Exercise, Black Magic

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.

Topics: Funny, Dog, Lying

No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.

Topics: Spring, Water, Worry, Fridges, Spring Water

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.

Topics: Happiness, Virtue, Function

When you cut into the present the future leaks out.

Topics: Cutting, Leaks

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Topics: Evil, Faces, Needs

Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding. Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.

Topics: Sex, Pain, Animal, Sex Drive, Libido

No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.

Topics: Organization, Needs, Body, Incompatibility

Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

Topics: Clients, Junk, Ultimate, Merchandise, Sewers

Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.

Topics: World, Mark, Beats

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.

Topics: Arbitrary

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.

Topics: Relief, Pleasure

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1989). “The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Communication, People, Scary, Remaining Silent

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.

Topics: Cat, Shelter, Want

I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

Topics: Positive, Hate, People, Important Questions

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

Topics: Grief, Sadness, Sentimentality, Joy And Sadness, Deep Sadness

It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.

Topics: Littles, Enough

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

Topics: Hipster, Men, Acting

A functioning police state needs no police.

Topics: Government, Police, Atheism, Police State

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

Topics: Beautiful, Cat, Eye, Blazing

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Topics: Hate, Conformity, I Hate

Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.

Topics: Girl, Fighting, Boys

God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire

Topics: Karma, Queens, Stupid, Toothless, Bad Karma

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Topics: Machines

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

Topics: Cat, Pet, Individualism, Cat Dog, Pets Cats

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

Topics: Superficial, Relative

I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.371, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Animal, Persons

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Topics: Fake People, Fake, Quality, Great Writing, Writing Life

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.

Topics: Love, Flower, Thinking

My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.

Topics: Ignorance, Cat

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.

Topics: Dream, Cutting, Men

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.

source: - "Ales Kot's highly ambitious Zero explores the deep roots of violence" by Shea Hennum and Oliver Sava, www.avclub.com. July 22, 2015.

Topics: Art, Mean, Writing

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.

Topics: Love, Natural, Painkillers

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ***** the result is the same: addiction.

Topics: Addiction, Ass, Results, Drug Addict, Drug Addiction

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...

Topics: Hate, Ignorance, Octopus

Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

Topics: Dog, Cat, Psychics

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

Topics: Facts, Sometimes, Paranoia

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.

Topics: Funny Sarcastic, Alcohol, Drug, Drugs And Alcohol

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

Topics: War, Victory, Purpose

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

Topics: Hurt, Feelings, Risk, Reserves

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

Topics: Writing, Psychics, Space

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Topics: Boredom, Deviants

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

Topics: Philosophy, Littles, Psychedelic

Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.

Topics: Knowing, Might, Born

what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

Topics: Spiritual, Stupid, Hate, Sadistic, Swollen

No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.78, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Alive

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2013). “The Place of Dead Roads: A Novel”, p.117, Holt Paperbacks

Topics: Mind Your Own Business, Provocative, Own Business, Mind Your Own, Minding My Own Business

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

Topics: Good Night, Sleep, Way, Rattlesnakes

in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen

Topics: Magic, Coincidence, Accidents, Coincidence In Life, External Forces

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

Topics: Goal, Suffering, Negative

What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.

Topics: Creativity, Quality, Doe

Open your mind and let the pictures out

Topics: Mind

I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.

Topics: Positive, Hate, People, Sulky, Important Questions

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?

Topics: Vacation, Years, Two

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.320, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Country, Silence, Allies

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Crazy, Thinking, Mind

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

Topics: Discovery, Finding Yourself, Answers, Discovering The World

To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

source: - Source: realitystudio.org

Topics: Mistake, Political, Bulls

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1993). “The Adding Machine: Selected Essays”, p.16, Arcade Publishing

Topics: Business, Mind, Atheism, Minding My Own Business, Own Business

I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute at all, and if they are cute they very rapidly outgrow it.

source: - "Conversations with William S. Burroughs".

Topics: Cute, Cat, People

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.

source: - Source: realitystudio.org

Topics: Political, May, Conflict

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

Topics: Men, Long, Heaven

Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

Topics: Crazy, Pits, Fool, Terminal, Drivel

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Reality, Way, Faces, Ahead Of Time

There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.

Topics: Addiction, Drug, Feelings

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.

Topics: Political Revolution, Important, Asking

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Wells, Consumers, Degrading

as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

source: - William S Burroughs (2012). “My Education: A Book of Dreams”, p.211, Penguin UK

Topics: Prison, Possibility, Knows

By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.

source: - William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (2001). “Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs”, p.53, Grove Press

Topics: Flaws

When you stop growing you start dying.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.49, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Dying, Growing

NOTHING happens by coincidence.

Topics: Coincidence, Happens

I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love-that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.

Topics: Christian, Falling In Love, Sex, Physical Attraction

One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Art, People, Important

Piss off Satan and don't take me for dumber than I look.

Topics: Fear, Atheism, Looks

Consider the impasse of a one-God universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can't go anywhere, since He is already everywhere. He can't do anything, since the act of doing presupposes opposition. His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic, having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death, to keep his dying show on the road.

source: - "Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (A One God Universe)". Studio album by William S. Burroughs with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, September 28, 1993.

Topics: Powerful, War, Knowing, Impasse

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.

Topics: Mind, Function, Written

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

Topics: Want, Ethics

I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.

source: - "Naked Lunch at 50: An Interview with William S. Burroughs (excerpt)". Jaguar Magazine, 1966.

Topics: Deterioration, Hopeless, Arise

I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

Topics: Creating, World, Imaginary, Imaginary World

I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

source: - "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks".

Topics: Fear, Men, Nuts

I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it.

source: - Source: realitystudio.org

Topics: Real, Hands, Conspiracy

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

Topics: Live Life, Alive, Life Is

(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.

Topics: Giving, Waiting, Hungry

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1988). “The Western Lands”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Shadow Of Death, People, Saying Nothing, Vapid

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.435, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Truth

You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.

source: - William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg (1982). “Letters to Allen Ginsberg, 1953-1957”, Full Court Pr

Topics: Pain, Order, Use

Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.

Topics: Christian, War, Charity, Inquisition, Hiroshima

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

source: - "New York library buys personal archives of Naked Lunch author" by Dan Glaister, www.theguardian.com. March 1, 2006.

Topics: Creativity, Artist, People, Observing

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.

Topics: People, Degrees, Realizing, Approximation, True Potential

The word is now a virus.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.208, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Viruses

He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1974). “Exterminator!: A Novel”

Topics: Mind, Done, Body

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

Topics: Fiction

We should exterminate all rational thought.

Topics: Should, Rational, Rational Thought

Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'

source: - William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

Topics: Eye, People, Sake

Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2013). “Cities of the Red Night: A Novel”, p.60, Holt Paperbacks

Topics: Long, Snow, Stranger

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

source: - Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

Topics: Cancer, Bureaucracy

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.

source: - Source: www.stopsmilingonline.com

Topics: Thinking, Psychics, Drug, Hallucinogens, Consciousness Expanding

Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead”, p.63, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Moving, Home, Want

When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2012). “Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk"”, p.49, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Talking, People, Movement, Inexorable, Bowel Movements

Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.

Topics: Jesus, Fruit, Christ, Disclaimers

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.

Topics: Technology, Brain, Purpose

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Love, Life, Dream

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.

Topics: Mind, May, Awakening, Nonconformist

There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.

source: - Source: realitystudio.org

Topics: Dreamer

Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

source: - "The Place of Dead Roads".

Topics: War, Victory, Purpose

If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

Topics: Data, Viewpoints, Ifs

Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1984). “Naked lunch”, Grove Pr

Topics: Kids, Eye, Mirrors, Tasty, Hot Shots

And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not.

Topics: Cat, Animal, Years

For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.

source: - William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac (2009). “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks”, p.57, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Years, People, Bed

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1984). “Naked lunch”, Grove Pr

Topics: Morning, Glasses, Lust

His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.

Topics: Wall, Sadness, Cat, Pottery, Cryptic

The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

Topics: Pain, Simple, Creative, Hallucinogens, Morphine

Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.

Topics: Confusion, Confusing, Vision

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.

source: - Source: realitystudio.org

Topics: War, Creative, Political, Political Movements, Horsing Around

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.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1993). “The Adding Machine: Selected Essays”, p.87, Arcade Publishing

Topics: Love, Life, Money

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.

source: - William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (2001). “Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs”, p.53, Grove Press

Topics: Lying, Book, Men, Pretense

My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.

source: - "Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs".

Topics: Ignorance, Cat, Saved

If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.

Topics: Shots, Ifs

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Honesty, Pain, Voice, Blind Spots, Bovine

Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Naked Lunch: The Restored Text”, p.56, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Night, Hands, Lasts, Squeezing

There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.416, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Government, Law, Cities, Dwellers

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1993). “The Adding Machine: Selected Essays”, p.124, Arcade Publishing

Topics: Meaningful, War, Player, Termination

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.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.54, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Moving, Feelings, Vision

The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.

source: - Source: www.stopsmilingonline.com

Topics: Needs, Behavior, Certain

I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Audience, Writing For Yourself

Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.

source: - William S. Burroughs (1979). “Ah Pook is here, and other texts”, Calder Publications Limited

Topics: Needs, Answers, Moderation

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

source: - Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

Topics: Dream, Country, Lying

A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.

source: - Quoted in Toronto Star, 22 Apr. 1989

Topics: Knowledge, Facts, Paranoid

Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.

Topics: Maturity, Caution

If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Responsibility, Levels, Intention

Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.

Topics: Lunch, Naked, Madness

I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.

Topics: Police, Kind, Ass

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.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.128, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Long, Tangier, World, Antisocial Behavior

Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2012). “Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk"”, p.150, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Special, Flesh, Nagging

Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes.

Topics: Believe, Mean, Reality, Hearing Voices

Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

source: - William S. Burroughs, Allen Hibbard (1999). “Conversations with William S. Burroughs”, p.2, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Forever, Shut Up, Telling The Truth

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

Topics: Thinking, Ideas, People, Malaria

Modern man has lost the option of silence.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.208, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Men, Silence, Modern

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.

source: - Source: www.litkicks.com

Topics: War, Police, Drug, Police Power, War On Drugs

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.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Doctors, Data, Psychology

Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like.

source: - William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (2001). “Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs”, p.165, Grove Press

Topics: Pain, Cancer, Laughing, Terminal, Excruciating Pain

What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.

source: - William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

Topics: Here And There, Littles, Facts, Thought Process

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.

Topics: Cute, Cat, Self, Cuteness