William S. Burroughs > Quotes

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.”
― William S. Burroughs

“I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
― William S. Burroughs

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs

“If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”
― William S. Burroughs

“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible”
― William S. Burroughs

“I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Language is a virus from outer space”
― William S. Burroughs

“there is nothing more provocative than minding your own business”
― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?”
― William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need.”
― William S. Burroughs

“There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.”
― William S. Burroughs

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs

“It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.”
― William S. Burroughs

“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...”
― William S. Burroughs

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.”
― William S. Burroughs, Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts

“Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.”
― William S. Burroughs

“In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.”
― William S. Burroughs

“I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers”
― William S. Burroughs

“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…”
― William S. Burroughs

“When you stop growing you start dying.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

“You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music,
sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to
produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae
to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any
more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself.
Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make
things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's
formulae.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

“as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.”
― William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

“A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside