William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
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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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To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. ... Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life.
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Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
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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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There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
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Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.
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All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.
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There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?
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Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.
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I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
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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.
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Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.
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Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
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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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A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.
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Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
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I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?