William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
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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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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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By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.
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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
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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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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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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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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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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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If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.
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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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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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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 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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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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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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Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
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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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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.