William S. Burroughs Quotes
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
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When you stop growing you start dying.
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Like Spain, I am bound to the past.
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Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
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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.
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We should exterminate all rational thought.
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Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.
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when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
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I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . .
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Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.
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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.
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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.'
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Modern man has lost the option of silence.
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in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen
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A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.
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Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
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How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
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Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
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How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
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[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.
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My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.
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I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.