William S. Burroughs Quotes
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Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
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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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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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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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There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.
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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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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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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.
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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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Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
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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.