William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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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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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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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A functioning police state needs no police.
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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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 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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Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.
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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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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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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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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
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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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For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
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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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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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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
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Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
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I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
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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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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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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
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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.