William S. Burroughs Quotes
-
The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
-
Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.
-
Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
-
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.
-
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.
-
"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.
-
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
-
As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
-
Shooting is my principal pastime.
-
Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
-
I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.