William S. Burroughs Quotes

Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.

He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime.

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

I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.

The word is now a virus.

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.

Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.

Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.

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.

I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.

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.

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

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

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.

I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . .

Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.

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.

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

Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.

[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.

Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.

Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. "I don't have any whiskey," may be a fact but it is not a truth.

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.'

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

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

You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.

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.

An addict never stops growing. Stupider.

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

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

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

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.

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

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.

A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.

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.

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

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

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 make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.

How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far.

The idea was that we would decide the order when we looked at the proofs. I remember Brion Gysin saying "Well, why change it? It's perfect the way it is, the way it came from the printer." Made one major change, that is, the first chapter that came from the printers, which would be the beginning, we moved to the end. The first chapter became the last chapter. There's no actual cutups in Naked Lunch.

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

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.

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

I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.

There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.