William S. Burroughs Quotes
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The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
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I certainly wouldn't advocate anyone using drugs on a regular or habitual basis.
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After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
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The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.
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Too perfect to be sexually attractive.
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Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.
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The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.
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(1) Never give anything away for nothing. (2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). (3) Always take everything back if you possibly can.
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as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.
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Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
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The simplest questions are the most difficult.
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Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.
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A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.
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Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.
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We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse
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To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.
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When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.
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One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.
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If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.
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Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.
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If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
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Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
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I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
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It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from a more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another-the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter