Words matter. These are the best William S. Burroughs Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?
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.
An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
The world wasn’t a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
Junk is the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience – any… thing.
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
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.
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.
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller.
I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all.
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
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.
Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.
The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don’t buy love for nothing.
Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: ‘For God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you.’
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo – and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I’m going to paint until I paint it, so it’s almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can’t help but know what he’s going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager.’
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
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.
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
A functioning police state needs no police.
The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
Changes… can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it – it will reassemble in the same form.
Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.
Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
