William Burroughs Quotes

[Allen] Ginsberg totally helped that out. He was the best sales person. He was the most pop. They are still shocking and relevant, especially [William] Burroughs. ~ Yony Leyser

I was his "little girl with the William Burroughs mind," his "secret fairy," "female Frank Zappa" and "window onto a magical world." He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams. ~ Jalina Mhyana

The dichotomy of the gun-toting, substance-abusing queer seeking spiritual refuge might strike some as anticlimactic. But William Burroughs was not what he appeared to be to many of his fans. The work which so many revere as biblical texts in the church of addiction were always seen by the writer himself as cautionary rather than visionary. ~ William S. Burroughs

After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road. ~ William S. Burroughs

I tell this anecdote with tongue in cheek at the start of my book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, but my academic involvement with Burroughs was entirely due to my tutor at Oxford, Peter Conrad. I was discussing with him the idea of staying on to do graduate work and when I tossed the name of Burroughs into the conversation - well, he let it fall loudly onto the floor, and proceeded to cross himself as if warding off an evil spirit. Since I was very ambivalent about an academic career in any case, that decided it for me. ~ Oliver Harris

Authors and artists are still afraid of breaking away as far as [William Burroughs] did ... And he did it in the 50s! ~ Yony Leyser

This is the part they don't tell you about in the movies. Or in On the Road. This is not rock 'n' roll.

You are not William Burroughs, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if Kurt Cobain was slumped over in an alleyway in Seattle the day Bleach came out. There is no junkie chic. This is not Soho and you are not Sid Vicious. You are not a drugstore cowboy and you are not spotting trains. You are not a part of anything - no underground sect, no counter-culture movement, no music scene, nothing. You have just been released from jail and are walking down Mission Street, alternating between taking a hit off a cigarette and puking, looking for coins on the ground so you can catch a bus as you shit yourself. ~ Joe Clifford

I was taken by William Burroughs' presence and intelligence from the first time I was introduced to him, by Lester Bangs in 1975. He was thrilling to listen to. When you heard him speak, you felt that you were privy to such a rare mind. Even in small-talk, he spoke with perfect economy of language. His shoots with me were very collaborative and it was an incredible opportunity to be able to photograph him over the course of twenty years. ~ Kate Simon

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

Unquestionably, this drug is is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in Naked Lunch directly to the use of cannabis. ~ William Burroughs

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He'd appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway. ~ Patti Smith

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode. ~ Jerry Stahl

Skullcrack City messes with your mind the way William Burroughs or a bellyful of hallucinogens will do. I'm a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he's been bringing it for years. This time, though, it's different. He's burst into the clear and is taking seven-league strides across the literary landscape. ~ Laird Barron

I dreamt that I took William Burrough's penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, 'You're not a hero. You're not a hero. You're not. You're not. You're not.' "
"How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?"
…"I guess I'm nervous about my birthday. ~ Sarah Schulman

For a while, the gay thing seemed like such a big deal. But now, I don't think it is. It's just a comedy-drama about people who live in the United States. It's a slice-of-life. I play a character-that's it. But I was well aware of the gay lifestyle before the show. I've been hit on in a really strong way by gay men who've tried to convert me, and a lot of my heroes are gay. William Burroughs, Lou Reed. Well, I guess Lou Reed is bi. The point is, it's 2002, gay life is no longer that shocking. ~ Gale Harold

Oh my god, this is so weird! I'm in space, talking to a giant insect. This is like ... I don't know ... William Burroughs or something! ~ Gavin G. Smith

Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot. ~ William Gibson

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university. ~ Patti Smith

During this period of his life, Burroughs was seeking a physical utopia, a place where he could live and act as he wanted with interference from neither official state authority nor unofficial moral authority. In fact, he wanted to live in a place where he was out of place and where consequently he would be free. ~ Greg A. Mullins

Satan trembles, when he sees the weakest Saint upon his knees. ~ William Cowper

Que bonito es el mundo; Lastima es que yo me muera." "How beautiful is the world; It's a pity that I must die. ~ William Carlsen

Why is it that so many people are afraid to admit they are happy? ~ William Lyon Phelps

The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse [...] stuck in my mind because of the subject's flagrant health and safety violation. As any competent practitioner will tell you, you always complete your protective circle *before* you start your workings. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Few are made better by prosperity, whom afflictions make worse. ~ William Gurnall

The wound of peace is surety, Surety secure; but modest doubt is called The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches To th' bottom of the worst. ~ William Shakespeare

President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone. ~ William Westmoreland

I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*. ~ William Carlos Williams

LOVE'S SECRET Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind doth move Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart, Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears. Ah! she did depart! Soon after she was gone from me, A traveller came by, Silently, invisibly: He took her with a sigh. ~ William Blake

You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university. ~ William Hazlitt

Presently, we were aware of an odour gradually coming towards us, something musky, fiery, savoury, mysterious, - a hot drowsy smell, that lulls the senses, and yet enflames them, - the truffles were coming. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Any departure from fact is the first step on a slippery slope toward unbelievability. ~ William A. Henry III

This thing of darkness I acknowlege mine. There is nothing more confining than the prison we don't know we are in. ~ William Shakespeare

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,
With your harmonious choir
Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,
That my old care may cease ... ~ William Butler Yeats

Few people realize this, but cutting down the trees is one of the things that keeps us Malawians poor. ~ William Kamkwamba

For most surfers, I think - for me, certainly - waves have a spooky duality. When you are absorbed in surfing them, they seem alive. They each have personalities, distinct and intricate, and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way - too many people have likened riding waves to making love. And yet waves are of course not alive, not sentient, and the lover you reach to embrace may turn murderous without warning. It's nothing personal. That self-disemboweling death wave on the inside bar is not bloody-minded. Thinking so is just reflex anthropomorphism. Wave love is a one-way street. ~ William Finnegan

Folks called this place haunted, felt the emanations of an unspeakable act moving outward like ripples on water. ~ William Gay

I will never lie again. ~ William Faulkner

A man in business must put up many affronts if he loves his own quiet. ~ William Penn

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the 'moved' character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it's communication. ~ William L. Stull

Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions. ~ William Zinsser

We're going to kill them, aren't we?" William Ann asked.
"Yes."
"How much are they worth?"
"Sometimes, child, it's not about what a man is worth. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Real life is never, never as simple as a movie. ~ William Boyd

William glanced at her sword. His upper lip rose, showing her his teeth. My, my, Lord Bill, what big fangs you have. That was all right. She wasn't Red Riding Hood, she wasn't scared, and her grandmother could curse his ass so hard, he wouldn't know which way was up for a week. ~ Ilona Andrews

I am ashes where I once was fire, And the bard in my bosom is dead; What I loved I now merely admire, And my heart is as grey as my head. ~ William Shakespeare

The American flag has not been planted on foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity's sake. ~ William McKinley

Every time you acquire a new interest, even more, a new accomplishment, you increase your power of life. ~ William Lyon Phelps

Well thank you, me old gobbler,' said Mr. Gum handing over some money that Billy William would later discover to be made out of lies and broken promises. ~ Andy Stanton

To consume the Eucharist is an act of anticonsumption, for here to consume is to be consumed, to be taken up into participation in something larger than the self, yet in a way in which the identity of the self is paradoxically secured. ~ William T. Cavanaugh

Well, the thing that I suppose is closest to my heart is Shakespeare. I really am a nerd about Shakespeare, I love it [laughs] and the reason why is because he's one of the wisest, most compassionate writers in the course of Western literature, in the course of all literature. And he understood human nature so deeply, not just our great capacity for virtue and for goodness, and for love, but our capacity for pain and destruction and anger. ~ Tom Hiddleston

Grownups know things, said Piggy. They ain't afraid of the dark. They'd meet and have tea and discuss. Then things 'ud be alright
They wouldn't set fire to the island. Or lose
They'd build a ship
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life.
They wouldn't quarrel
Or break my specs
Or talk about a beast
If only they could get a message to us, cried Ralph desperately. If only they could send us something grownup ... a sign or something. ~ William Golding

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come - and gone. It's time for change in America. ~ William J. Clinton

You have to make a conscious decision to change for your own well-being and that of your family and your country. ~ William J. Clinton