William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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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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The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
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Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
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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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Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
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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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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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When you cut into the present the future leaks out.
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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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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 no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.
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Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
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Language is a virus from outer space.
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Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.
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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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Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
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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.
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Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
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There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
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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.