William S. Burroughs Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I remember standing on a medal podium at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, imbued with a sense that if you won enough basketball games, there was no such thing as poor, backward, country, female, or inferior.
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My soul is to sell. The dark is too hard to beat 'cause they're calling me.
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There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
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I'm gonna have to start winning some of the matches to call it a rivalry!
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It seems that boredom is one of the greatest discoveries of our time. If so, there's no question but that he must be considered a pioneer.
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It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
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Liquor prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in America, and drug prohibition has led to the rise of the gang problems we have now.
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I think of my art materials not as junk but as garbage. Manure, actually: it goes from being the waste material of one being to the life-source of another.
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The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.
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We spend months inside them, then the rest of our lives getting babied by them.
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The rigid tree will be felled.
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And an ocean can swallow you, even when you can swim.
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Even when I'm old and grey I'll probably be cruising around and bunny-hopping and stuff. In the words of the Descendents, "I don't want to grow up."
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A great song for me is when I hear it and it's contagious. The lyrics and the melody, if grows on you once and you want to hear it over and over again.
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I was taken by William Burroughs’ presence and intelligence from the first time I was introduced to him, by Lester Bangs in 1975. He was thrilling to listen to. When you heard him speak, you felt that you were privy to such a rare mind. Even in small-talk, he spoke with perfect economy of language. His shoots with me were very collaborative and it was an incredible opportunity to be able to photograph him over the course of twenty years.
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when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
