William S. Burroughs Quotes
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I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
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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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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
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Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.
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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
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I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.
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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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Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
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You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
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Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.
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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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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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Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
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Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
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I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.
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I took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound.
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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
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I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
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His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.
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A functioning police state needs no police.
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He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime.