William S. Burroughs Quotes

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

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

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.

This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.

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

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

Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.

The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time.

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.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.

Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

The word is now a virus.

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.'

Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.

An addict never stops growing. Stupider.

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.

Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'

For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.

Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.

[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.

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

The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.

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

Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.

If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it.

The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.

The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.

You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.

I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.

The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.

The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.

Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.

I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.

He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.

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

The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.

I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . .

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

If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.

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.

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.