William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.
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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
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If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.
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For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
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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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Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.
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I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.
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A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.
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I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
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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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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.
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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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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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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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I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
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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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In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations.
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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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Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
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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.
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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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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.