William S Burroughs Quotes

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

“If J.G. Ballard had been on Twitter, I doubt he'd have cat-posted. Wm. S. Burroughs, on the other hand, probably would have. He loved cats. I received Christmas cards from Burroughs. All were cute cat cards.”
― William Gibson

“Flannery O'Connor had a certain genius. I don't think John Updike has, or Norman Mailer or William Styron, all of whom are talented, but they don't exceed themselves in any way. Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.”
― Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote

“In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was Naked Lunch, but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative.”
― Peter Dubé, Best Gay Stories 2012

“Know who I am? . . . 'Good Bye Mister' is my name . . . 'Wind and Dust' is my name . . . 'Never Happened' is my name . . .”
― William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded

“William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“During this period of his life, Burroughs was seeking a physical utopia, a place where he could live and act as he wanted with interference from neither official state authority nor unofficial moral authority. In fact, he wanted to live in a place where he was out of place and where consequently he would be free.”
― Greg A. Mullins

“Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay”
― William S. Burroughs, Ah Pook is Here! and Other Texts

“After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Era una sera d'aprile, appena prima dell'imbrunire. Uscii nella veranda posteriore. All'estremità della veranda c'era il primo gatto grigio e accanto a lui c'era un grosso gatto bianco che non avevo mai visto. Il gatto bianco viene verso di me, strofinandosi contro le gambe del tavolo, piano, esitante. Alla fine si acciambella ai miei piedi, fa le fusa.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

“Land of the Dead. No breakfast. No liquor. No dinner.”
― William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

“There is not much to say about Burrough's writing. It consists of semiliterate ravings by a very sick mind, a kaleidoscope or surrealistic depictions of drug-taking, violent, often misogynistic fantasy, and sexual depravity.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“He [William S Burroughs] has no patience for my kind of neurosis, I know... But since then I've been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters