In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

Time is what death needs to grow people in.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

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

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.

Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.