"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

"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

"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

"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing."
— 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

"Language is a virus from outer space"
— William S. Burroughs

"Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will."
— 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

"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

"Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside. "
— William S. Burroughs

"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy."
— William S. Burroughs

"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: The Definitive Text of Junk)

"In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom."
— 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: The Restored Text)

"Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer."
— 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

"Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is."
— William S. Burroughs (Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs)

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
— 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

"The face of evil is always the face of total need.
"
— William S. Burroughs

"There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?"
— 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

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

"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

"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)

"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)

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

"Like Spain, I am bound to the past."
— William S. Burroughs

"Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one."
— William S. Burroughs

"Smash the control images. Smash the control machine."
— 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

"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

"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

""Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction." "
— 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 a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go."
— William S. Burroughs (The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead)

"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

"As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary
"
— 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: The Restored Text)

"Cowboy: New York hood talk means kill the mother fucker wherever you find him. A rat is a rat is a rat is a rat. Is an informer."
— 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 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

"danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of
direct confrontation, you are immortal."
— William S. Burroughs (The Western Lands)

"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

"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

"Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
"
— William S. Burroughs

"I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers... I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants-a body-after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death...Nobody can breath and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh."
— William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch: The Restored Text)

"Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Gaurdian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.
-The Cat Inside"
— William S. Burroughs