William S. Burroughs Quotes
-
You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
-
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
-
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
-
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.
-
Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.
-
You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.
-
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
-
All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.
-
When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.
-
As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
-
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'
-
If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.
-
I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.
-
Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding. Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.
-
[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.
-
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
-
[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
-
Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.
-
There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
-
This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
-
Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like.
-
Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel.
-
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
-
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.