William S. Burroughs Quotes
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There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.
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Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'
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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
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I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.
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In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason.
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The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
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A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.
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I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.
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I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: "New Mexico, land of enchantment."
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Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far.
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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 the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.
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The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms - this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color.
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I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.
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England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
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If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.
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I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
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I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
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Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
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The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.
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God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
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Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.