William S. Burroughs Quotes

Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.

If you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.

danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.

Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.

It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.

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

The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

Piss off Satan and don't take me for dumber than I look.

We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.

Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.

When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.

Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.

The Planet drifts to random insect doom.

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

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.

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

All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.

Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.

I certainly wouldn't advocate anyone using drugs on a regular or habitual basis.

I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.

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

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.

We can translate word and letter into color - [Arthur] Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote "words" can be read in silent color.

In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.

The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government.

Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay

Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.

I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.

I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man.

Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through.

Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy - always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups - the largest race is the Mongoloid group.

So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.

Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.

I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.

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.

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.

You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

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

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.

Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any f...ing thing.

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

Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.

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

Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!

In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.

[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.