William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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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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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
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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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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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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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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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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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For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it: No context ... like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.
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I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
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I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence.
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He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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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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A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.