William S. Burroughs Quotes
-
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
-
If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
-
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
-
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.
-
If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever.
-
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.
-
(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.
-
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.
-
Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
-
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
-
Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.
-
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.
-
Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
-
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
-
He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.
-
[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
-
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.
-
Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.
-
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.
-
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.
-
People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.
-
This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
-
[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.
-
As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.