William S. Burroughs Quotes
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For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
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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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His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.
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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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A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.
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It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.
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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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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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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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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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There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.
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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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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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Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.
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Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
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A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
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That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.
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Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.
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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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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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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
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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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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 think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.