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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Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
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For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
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Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
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England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
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Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?
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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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By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.
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The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.
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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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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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If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.
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The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
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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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You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
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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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Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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I took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound.
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A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
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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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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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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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So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.