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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Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
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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 consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.
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Shooting is my principal pastime.
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As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'
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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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Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.
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The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.
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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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"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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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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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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Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy - always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups - the largest race is the Mongoloid group.
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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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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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There are no innocent bystanders.
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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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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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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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There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.
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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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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 project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.