William S. Burroughs Quotes
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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
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Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.
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Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.
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Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
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First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother.
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danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.
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How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
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The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.
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As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'
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Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
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There are no innocent bystanders.
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Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.
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There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.
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My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
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The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
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"I wouldn't be in your position" - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us.
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Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay
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I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.
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The idea was that we would decide the order when we looked at the proofs. I remember Brion Gysin saying "Well, why change it? It's perfect the way it is, the way it came from the printer." Made one major change, that is, the first chapter that came from the printers, which would be the beginning, we moved to the end. The first chapter became the last chapter. There's no actual cutups in Naked Lunch.
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When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.
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what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.
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If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.
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Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply . . . not . . . true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.
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I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts.