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There are no innocent bystanders.
William S. Burroughs -
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.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs -
I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.
William S. Burroughs -
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
William S. Burroughs -
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
William S. Burroughs -
Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'
William S. Burroughs -
A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs -
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.
William S. Burroughs -
If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.
William S. Burroughs -
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
William S. Burroughs -
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
William S. Burroughs -
I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
William S. Burroughs
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As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
William S. Burroughs -
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.
William S. Burroughs -
My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.
William S. Burroughs -
Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
William S. Burroughs -
Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.
William S. Burroughs -
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs -
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
William S. Burroughs -
All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.
William S. Burroughs -
I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love-that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.
William S. Burroughs