They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.


William S. Burroughs

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Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
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There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
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A functioning police state needs no police.
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Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer ...
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I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
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Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an...
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Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic s...
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This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on ...
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My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been r...
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.
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Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most ef...
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Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will craw...
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The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to w...
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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they h...
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Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too pr...
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Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, becaus...
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So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be don...
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A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstor...
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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
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Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
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No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure...
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There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, s...
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Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that...
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After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I s...
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You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in sil...
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An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
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Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a ...
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Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
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Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
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The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.
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Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller.
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I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
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Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
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My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.
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You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
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Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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The Pusher always gets it all back.
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ''I want to see the manager.''
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Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers.
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when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
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I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.
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It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.
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When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.
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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
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When you stop growing you start dying.
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No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls.
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Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
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Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
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Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a th...
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NAKED Lunch -- a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.
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The only possible ETHIC is to do what one wants to do.
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Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
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How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
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I was new in the game and like all young thieves thought I had a license to steal. It didn't last.
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I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
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Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
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I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle eve...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The youth rebellion [1968] is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
He considered that immortality was the only goal worth striving for. He knew it was not something yo...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and to...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony. People have goofed or we wouldn't be here.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
All the role models are being exposed and this is good because role models are shit. The quicker we ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute,
& if they are cute the...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some larg...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking the...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted ...
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