William S. Burroughs Quotes
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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
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Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
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Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
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As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
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In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations.
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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
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For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
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Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
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I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.
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I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.
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If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
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It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.
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So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
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Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises. Don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.
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I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.
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I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
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A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
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There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.
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I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.
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Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.
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Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
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Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.