William S Burroughs Quotes

I've seen villages in South America with no police whatever. Then the cops would arrive, then the sanitary inspectors, and before you know it they've got all the problems - crime, juvenile delinquency, the whole works - just like us. ~ William S. Burroughs

The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. ~ William S. Burroughs

putting on a "b" production for a fruit ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor ... "Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin! ~ William S. Burroughs

I've learned a hell of a lot from [William S.] Burroughs. I think the best things in my books probably are inspired by Burroughs. I think about what Burroughs wrote and then I try to go one step further. And I may go one step back; I don't know. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

All the world's a gallows and we all play our parts, some are towel boys, others lewd doctors, most of us just dirty old men whimper at life's Glory Hole. ~ William S. Burroughs

If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data. ~ William S. Burroughs

Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect. ~ William S. Burroughs

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. ~ William S. Burroughs

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ~ William S. Burroughs

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function. ~ William S. Burroughs

Most people don't notice what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: for God's sake, keep your eyes open. ~ William S. Burroughs

No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought. ~ William S. Burroughs

I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host. ~ William S. Burroughs

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don't wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months' shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don't really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict's special need. You don't decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you're an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii) ~ William S. Burroughs

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

Know who I am? ... 'Good Bye Mister' is my name ... 'Wind and Dust' is my name ... 'Never Happened' is my name ... ~ William S. Burroughs

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

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart. ~ William S. Burroughs

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 ~ William S. Burroughs

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight. ~ William S. Burroughs

I tried more than once to tell you, to communicate what I know. You did not or could not listen. You can not show to anyone what he has not seen. ~ William S. Burroughs

(1) Never give anything away for nothing.
(2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait).
(3) Always take everything back if you possibly can. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

An addict never stops growing. Stupider. ~ William S. Burroughs

As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape. ~ William S. Burroughs

Anything that can be accomplished chemically can be accomplished in other ways. ~ William S. Burroughs

The country with a low birth rate and low death rate will be hardest hit - and so the poor may indeed inherit the earth, because they're healthier. ~ William S. Burroughs

When I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow. ~ William S. Burroughs

Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history. ~ William S. Burroughs

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

I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man. ~ William S. Burroughs

For instance, they [The Federal Narcotics Bureau ] give out that marijuana is a harmful and habit-forming drug, and it simply isn't. They claim that you can get addicted to opiates with one shot, and you can't. They over-estimate the physical bad effects, and so forth. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug. ~ William S. Burroughs

I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy," direct. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. ~ William S. Burroughs

What's with the serum?"
I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything ... Turn a massacre into a sex orgy ... "
Or a joke."
Precisely. Arty type ... No principles ... ~ William S. Burroughs

Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm? ~ William S. Burroughs

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business. ~ William S. Burroughs

After the shot he collapsed on the bed and lay there inert, but something was stirring in his spine from neck to the tail - and now pieces tore loose in the eggs and then a red, glistening head emerges in reeking yellow slime - and then the whole centipede crawling out quick. ~ William S. Burroughs

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever? ~ William S. Burroughs

The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic insanity, random events in a dying universe. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. ~ William S. Burroughs

A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

Now my inspiration but it won't last and we'll be just a photograph - i ~ William S. Burroughs

Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey. ~ William S. Burroughs

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. ~ William S. Burroughs

The unworthies in power feel danger, like cows uneasily pawing the ground with a great Moo. ~ William S. Burroughs

Moor did not have tuberculosis or kidney trouble or undulant fever.He was sick with the sickness of death.Death was in every cell of his body. ~ William S. Burroughs

You can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reaction by using a tape recorder than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture. ~ William S. Burroughs

Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better. ~ William S. Burroughs

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. ~ William S. Burroughs

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth. ~ William S. Burroughs

No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive. ~ William S. Burroughs

Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. "I don't have any whiskey," may be a fact but it is not a truth. ~ William S. Burroughs

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination. ~ William S. Burroughs

In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal. ~ William S. Burroughs

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

Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness. ~ William S. Burroughs

A junkie spends half his life waiting. ~ William S. Burroughs

"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. ~ William S. Burroughs

We should exterminate all rational thought. ~ William S. Burroughs

I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government ... ~ William S. Burroughs

The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection. ~ William S. Burroughs

Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered. ~ William S. Burroughs

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

All you cat lovers, remember all the millions of cats mewling through the world's rooms lay all their hopes and trust in you. ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

Once a problem has been identified, it is already too late for a solution. ~ William S. Burroughs

Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass. ~ William S. Burroughs

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

Knowing you might not make it ... in that knowledge courage is born. ~ William S. Burroughs

...subway brakes spit ozone... ~ William S. Burroughs

Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. ~ William S. Burroughs

Never interfere in a girl and boy fight. ~ William S. Burroughs

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place? ~ William S. Burroughs

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. ~ William S. Burroughs

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer. ~ William S. Burroughs

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. ~ William S. Burroughs

I was never tempted by any political program... I don't want to hear about the fucking masses and I never did. ~ William S. Burroughs

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear. ~ William S. Burroughs

So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming "I got the fear!" and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant - mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters - and waited for the bus to town.

A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead. ~ William S. Burroughs

Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have. ~ William S. Burroughs

I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink ... ~ William S. Burroughs

Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh. ~ William S. Burroughs