William S. Burroughs Quotes

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

danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.

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.

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

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

Paranoia is just having the right information.

I took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound.

NOTHING happens by coincidence.

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

The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

If you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

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.

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

Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.

We should exterminate all rational thought.

The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.

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

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

The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.

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.

Dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so.

Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

According to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself God and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescent image. The boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. This angered God, who was getting on in years. He decided it endangered his position as CREATOR. So he crept upon the boy and anaesthetized him and made Eve from his rib. Henceforth all creation of beings would process through female channels. But some of Adam's phantoms refused to let God near them under any pretext.

Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.

Open your mind and let the pictures out

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

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.

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.

All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.

I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.

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

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

For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.

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.

The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.

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.

There are no innocent bystanders.

I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.

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

Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.

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.

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.

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.

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

[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.

In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.