William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.
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Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
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The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
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Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.
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Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
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Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide.
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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.
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In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.
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We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled - in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - unparalleled opportunity.
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When you cut into the present the future leaks out.
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America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
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There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.
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I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.
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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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There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
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Language is a virus from outer space.
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Shooting is my principal pastime.
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First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother.
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Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
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Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
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What originally established the band was cover songs like Not Fade Away. Then, later on, we got more well-known ones like Satisfaction, which you might say echoed the thinking of, well, any generation you care to name, including the present one. But we didn't set out on bits of paper that we were going to be the voice of a generation. The original aim of the Rolling Stones was to play blues. It wasn't even to play rock music.
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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
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The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.