Top 389 Quotes & Sayings by William S. Burroughs - Page 3

If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

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

(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.

There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.

Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.

My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Life is a vacation from two eternities.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.

Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.

I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.

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

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.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence.

We should exterminate all rational thought.

If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.

It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.

NOTHING happens by coincidence.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

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.

Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.

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

I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.

His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.

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

Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.

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.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.

A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.

Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.

The word is now a virus.

A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.

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.

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... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.

The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.

"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.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.

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

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.

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.

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.

You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.

Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.