William S. Burroughs Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I went through a lot in middle school, and you always try so many different looks and try to be so many different people. I finally realized I'm awkward, I'm lanky, and I'm going to embrace it - make fun of myself and just laugh.
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There's no specific mission statement for the 'Toast.'
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But I started it when I was going through a transitional time in my life. At the end of it, it really sort of symbolized it. I had made room to change, and room to grow. I recorded it in a little room.
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I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.
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The only thing I insist that everybody do is there has to be a basketball court in every game I do, and - with one exception, I let them get away with it once - you can actually shoot a ball through the basket in every game I've made.
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One needs to live every day according to God's commandments. And then any kind of difficulty or unpleasantness will be manageable.
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Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
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I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I've become. If I had, I'd have done it a lot earlier.
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Let us take our children seriously! Everything else follows from this... only the best is good enough for a child.
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Only the film industry can make you an overnight success. Unlike other jobs where you have to work your way up, here you can reach dizzying heights of fame instantly.
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You've got to bring yourself to any character you do.
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I can cure AIDS, and I will.
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Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.
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The Weizmann Institute showed me respect and didn't require many administrative tasks, so I was quite independent. I did what I wanted.
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I never went to school for acting; it just comes to me. I never practice. I read the script, I'll memorize it. I don't even practice the acting. I'll just do it the day, and it will just come to me.
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Music is split up now into little pockets.
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The wise individual doesn't get too attached to any of life's pleasures, knowing that wonderful science is hard at work proving it's bad for him.
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The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success.
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We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.
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Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness loom huge in my development as a writer. I think I'm always trying to write Heart of Darkness - trying to explode an abstraction in concrete terms, although I am aware that Conrad's story has a bit of baggage that I'd rather avoid in my work.
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Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.
