William S. Burroughs

Quotes

• “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...”
• “All political movements are basically anti-creative — since a political movement is a form of war. “There’s no place for...”
• “As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon...”
• “It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct j...”
• “I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation ...”
• “I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, b...”
• “All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to pr...”
• “A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous ac...”
• “You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing....”
• “If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that mu...”
• “What's with the serum?"I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The m...”
• “I don’t spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser loca...”
• “Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... "Stop ...”
• “Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for oth...”
• “For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before s...”
• “A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait f...”
• “After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't...”
• “The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himse...”
• “I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't mak...”
• “No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge....”
• “Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no busin...”
• “In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point i...”
• “When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. – A user is a continual state of shrinking and gro...”
• “This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other p...”
• “I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depresse...”
• “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing t...”
• “Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience--any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No...”
• “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man i...”
• “Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a...”
• “home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with some...”
• “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 wh...”
• “Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game i...”
• “Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to...”
• “I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not...”
• “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 fa...”
• “The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on...”
• “A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing...”
• “There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intens...”
• “Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona...”
• “The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for noth...”
• “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the f...”
• “Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without wa...”
• “Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden.”
• “How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.”
• “The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.”
• “I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute,& if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it”
• “Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.”
• “Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.”
• “The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers”
• “To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know.”