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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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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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 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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Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
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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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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 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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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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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 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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That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.
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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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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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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 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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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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If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.
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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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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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There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.
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Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
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A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.