William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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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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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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Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.
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Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.
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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 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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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
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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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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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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 shaman very much, the way he was crying.
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Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises. Don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.
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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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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 face of evil is always the face of total need.
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For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it: No context ... like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.
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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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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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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
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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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Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
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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.