Top 389 Quotes & Sayings by William S. Burroughs
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer William S. Burroughs.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
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.
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.
Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
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.'
A functioning police state needs no police.
The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
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.
Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
Language is a virus from outer space.
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.
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
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.
The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.
The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.
There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
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.
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.
Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.
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.
Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
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.
The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.
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?
Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
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.
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
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.
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
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