Μαϊκλ > Μαϊκλ's Quotes

“The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“It is inconceivable that Homo Sapiens could last another thousand years in present form. People of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners. And what do years mean, apart from human measurement and perception? Does time pass if there is no one there to register its passing? Of course not, since Time is a figment of human perception.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

“This planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“I wish to declare us the curators of our own psyches.”
― Sandy Jeffs, Poems From the Madhouse

“I've kept the jasmine and rotted horseflesh separate, knowing you'll do the honours. Destiny will greet us. After that you're on your own.”
― John Ashbery, Quick Question: New Poems

“I could have been a successful bank robber, gangster, business executive, psychoanalyst, drug trafficker, explorer, bullfighter, but the conjecture of circumstances was never there. Over the years I begin to doubt if my time will ever come. It will come, or it will not come. There is no use trying to force it. Attempts to break through have led to curbs, near disasters, warnings. I cultivate an alert passivity, as though watching an opponent for the slightest sign of weakness.”
― William S. Burroughs, Interzone

“I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself?”
― William S. Burroughs, Interzone

“- And do you know what the Americans and the Russians make their atoms with? They make them with the microbes of god.

- You are raving, Mr Artaud. You are mad.

- I am not raving. I am not mad. I'm telling you that microbes have been reinvented in order to impose a new idea of god.”
― Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period

“There is nothing more useless than a organ. When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty.”
― Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period