William S. Burroughs Quotes

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind?

Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide.

[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me ... he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.

Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.

Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce.

How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far.

Perhaps why I am so uniquely terrible is simply that I represent total Dissent. Total Dissent. T.D. 19 + 4 = 23.

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.

Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any ... thing.

I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

You see, control can never be a means to any practical end ... It can never be a means to anything but more control ... like junk..

Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.

Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.

"I wouldn't be in your position" - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us.

I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.

While in general I avoid the use of torture - torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance - the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as the Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the Switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine.

Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.

There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no solution. Just conflict. Only thing that can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats past and present.

Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.

The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

What a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm.

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.

Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties.

I was asked: "Why did you stop writing?" I would not know any more than I would know why I started writing. Try not to be as obtuse as you are.

His face with lined with suffering in which his eyes did not participate.

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts; thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison; thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger; thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot; thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes; thanks for the American Dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through; thanks for the KKK; for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches; for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces; thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers; thanks for laboratory AIDS; thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs; thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business; thanks for a nation of finks - yes, thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms; you always were a headache and you always were a bore; thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.

In many tenement apartments the front door opens directly into the kitchen. This was such an apartment and we were in the kitchen.

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know.

Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah," they will tell you. "He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?"

At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction - and history is fiction - I must say this:

"Bring together state of news - Inquire onward from state to doer - Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer - I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine - Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit - Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens - Stay out of the Garden of Delights - It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo - Throw back their ersatz Immortality - It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Sto

We're not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It's ours and we're going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog.

A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.

Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.

I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.

Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.

[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing ... I am a recording instrument ... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity" ... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function ... I am not an entertainer ...

Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.

Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.

It is inconceivable that Homo Sapiens could last another thousand years in present form. People of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners. And what do years mean, apart from human measurement and perception? Does time pass if there is no one there to register its passing? Of course not, since Time is a figment of human perception.

Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.

The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.

A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out.

Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply ... not ... true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

Dream long enough and dream hard enough
you will come to know
dreaming can make it so ...

There are no innocent bystanders ...

You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.

Gilbert and George said: "But don't you see? That's how Bacon is. He is absolutely right to behave as he wants." Not as he wants. As he has to behave. An artist must be open to the muse. The greater the artist, the more he is open to "cosmic currents." He has to behave as he does. If he has "the courage to be an artist," he is committed to behave as the mood possesses him. "That's the man who booed Princess Margaret!" - the peasantry shrink back from his sulfurous glow.

Brummel would rush upon his plate & gulp down a roast in such a revolting manner that the other guests complained they were nauseated and Brummel had to be fed in his room ... ... ... .

I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.

We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled - in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - unparalleled opportunity.

The ears were large, flaring forward, the eyes limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light: obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond.

A typical modern Puritan, she was able to believe in sin without believing in God. In fact, she felt there was something soft and sinful about believing in God. She rejected such indulgence like an indecent proposal.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

It is more profitable to give wages than to receive them.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh... Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones.

already, and the fuzz walks in on some newlyweds from Sioux Falls.

The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle ... yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling vaguely guilty.

If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.

If, after having been in someone's presence, you feel like you've lost a quart of plasma - avoid that presence. No one likes to hear the word "vampire" used around here... it's kind of bad for our public image.

In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

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.

Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes.

Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
(Interview, The Paris Review)

The Ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls."

Top soul (Vicarious), and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren the Secret name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that's where Ren came in.

Second soul (Jambi), and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power. LIGHT. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three (Wings/Days) is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she or it is third man out...depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead.

Number four (The Pot) is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five (L.C., Lost Keys, Rosetta Stoned) is Ka, the double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the We

Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.

I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it.

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.

The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.

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.

...subway brakes spit ozone...

The idea was that we would decide the order when we looked at the proofs. I remember Brion Gysin saying "Well, why change it? It's perfect the way it is, the way it came from the printer." Made one major change, that is, the first chapter that came from the printers, which would be the beginning, we moved to the end. The first chapter became the last chapter. There's no actual cutups in Naked Lunch.

I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute,
& if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it

The word is now a virus.

All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.

It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat.
This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought.

There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.

Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you.

Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.

Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.

The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. "Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin," as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion.