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My experience as an addict was very useful to me as writer: the whole syndrome of addiction and withdrawal and the extensions of that and other forms of addiction. It gave me a great deal of material. A writer can profit by something that someone else may not be able to profit from at all. Yet they were very disagreeable experiences. Very boring experiences.


William S. Burroughs

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More William S. Burroughs

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are fu...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling b...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS And if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around t...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wip...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. T...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner spa...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS A functioning police state needs no police.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The face of evil is always the face of total need.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The questio...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been r...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most ef...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will craw...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my g...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to w...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they h...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too pr...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, becaus...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be don...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstor...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be d...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in sil...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it....
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager....
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS When you stop growing you start dying.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's...
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no sec...
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a th...
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS He considered that immortality was the only goal worth striving for. He knew it was not something yo...
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony. People have goofed or we wouldn't be here.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute,
& if they are cute the...
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.
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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugl...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS All the filth and horror, fear, hate disease and death of human history flows between you and the We...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Writers don't write, they read and transcribe.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I don't make myself work. It's just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to kno...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS We gotta find a way off this goddamn cop-ridden planet.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody. . . . All knowledge all discoveries belong to you...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit w...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL think...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas . . . a cosmonaut of inner sp...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is . . . LOVE.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The questio...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Nothing is true, everything is permitted
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the c...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of fink...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's jus...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: the Mark Inside.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a to...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and pena...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, be...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstor...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base....
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS They are all stupid peasants, and the worst of all peasants are the so-called educated. These people...
WILLIAM S BURROUGHS Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someo...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any str...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, wo...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunc...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the fr...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, a...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent c...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Exterminate all rational thought
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS The aim of education is the knowledge, not the facts, but of values.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Did I ever tell you about the man
who taught his asshole to talk?

His whole abdomen ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." Th...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Hemingway said:
'It don't come anymore.'
So where did it go?
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS