William S. Burroughs Quotes
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
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You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
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Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.
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[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
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Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
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[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.
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As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
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There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
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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.
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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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Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
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Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
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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.
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Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.
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Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.
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I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
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Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.
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I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.
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The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.
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Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
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There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?
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This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
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All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.
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No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.