Top 389 Quotes & Sayings by William S. Burroughs - Page 4

There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

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

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.

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 do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes.

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

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.

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.

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.

[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.

Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot... Junkies have no shame... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido... The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.

Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.

As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'

For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it: No context ... like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.

The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms - this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color.

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

Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. ... Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life.

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

Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.

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

If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one.

Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.

Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.

You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.

The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.

What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.

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

Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.

No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.

Shooting is my principal pastime.

Time is what death needs to grow people in.

For any species to change, if they are unable and are unwilling to do so - I might, for example, have suggested to the dinosaurs that heavy armor and great size was a sinking ship, and that they do well to convert to mammal facilities - it would not lie in my power or desire to reconvert a reluctant dinosaur.

If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.

Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.

Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding. Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.

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

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

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.

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.

He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime.

A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

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

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

A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.

My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.