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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We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled - in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - unparalleled opportunity.
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Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
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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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I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.
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The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
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Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
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For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.
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The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
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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.
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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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I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.
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Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.
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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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Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
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We can translate word and letter into color - [Arthur] Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote "words" can be read in silent color.
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I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it.
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In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal.
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There are no innocent bystanders.
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Given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need - any form of need - you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible.
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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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As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'
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I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.
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The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.