William S. Burroughs Quotes & Sayings

Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith. — William S. Burroughs

It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from a more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another-the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter — William S. Burroughs

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy. — William S. Burroughs

The name's Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole. — William S. Burroughs

We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate population at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap. — William S. Burroughs

Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor ... "Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin! — William S. Burroughs

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, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up, as though I did not have control over my actions. — William S. Burroughs

When you have a decision to make, get all the factors in front of you and look at the situation as a whole. Just look. Don't try to decide. The answer will come to you. — William S. Burroughs

The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line. — William S. Burroughs

Here I sit with my three old cats, getting closer to eternity all the time, on a twine chair - (Van Gogh) and me too - and it gets very depressing. What can I do? I had high hopes. We all did. Remember just outside the Tangier Consulate: "Have you met the Skipper yet?" Later I did. And now no skipping, no transport anywhere, except to a cut-rate mortuary. Where were you when I wasn't there? "Hound of Hell!!" screamed the Pop Star, and kicked the fink dog in the nuts. "Only decent thing I done." "Forget the whole thing. I have." Great gasp at this point. How much time? have I left? Not much it seems. — William S. Burroughs

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work. — 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

I took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound. — William S. Burroughs

The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues. — William S. Burroughs

A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait. — William S. Burroughs

Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme. — William S. Burroughs

Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years.
And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage. — William S. Burroughs

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive. — William S. Burroughs

I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area. — William S. Burroughs

I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? — William S. Burroughs

Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom. — William S. Burroughs

Changes ... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form. — William S. Burroughs

We should exterminate all rational thought. — William S. Burroughs

Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through. — William S. Burroughs

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise. — William S. Burroughs

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

Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness. — William S. Burroughs

May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten. I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy. I look inside and there are her other four kittens.
Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go. — William S. Burroughs

Successful control means achieving a balance and avoiding a showdown where all-out force would be necessary. — William S. Burroughs

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future. — William S. Burroughs

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity. — William S. Burroughs

Open your mind and let the pictures out — William S. Burroughs

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

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

I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. — William S. Burroughs

Knowing you might not make it ... in that knowledge courage is born. — William S. Burroughs

A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, Mmmm, that's my rich substance. — William S. Burroughs

If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it. — William S. Burroughs

You don't sell a film by saying you won't show it. There may be secrets too horrible for a man to know and keep his own sanity but that won't go down in Hollywood, Mister. — William S. Burroughs

The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government ... — William S. Burroughs

A paranoid is someone who has all the facts. — William S. Burroughs

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear. — William S. Burroughs

The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. — William S. Burroughs

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

Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes. — 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

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 Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy. — William S. Burroughs

Cut word lines - Cut music lines - Smash the control images - Smash the control machine - Burn the books - Kill the priests - Kill! Kill! Kill! — William S. Burroughs

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust. — William S. Burroughs

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time ... — William S. Burroughs

I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins. — William S. Burroughs

I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself. — William S. Burroughs

two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabaster straws — William S. Burroughs

The boys eat happily looking into each other's eyes. Blood runs down their chins. — William S. Burroughs

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever? — William S. Burroughs

Time is what death needs to grow people in. — William S. Burroughs

Here lies a stupid son of a bitch who tried to make Death a company cop — William S. Burroughs

Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another. — William S. Burroughs

Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism. — William S. Burroughs

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. — William S. Burroughs

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts. — William S. Burroughs

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

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

The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it. — William S. Burroughs

The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. — William S. Burroughs

You're both mother fuckers. She was half asleep. Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest. — William S. Burroughs

A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased. — William S. Burroughs

I tried more than once to tell you, to communicate what I know. You did not or could not listen. You can not show to anyone what he has not seen. — William S. Burroughs

As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.' — William S. Burroughs

We're not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It's ours and we're going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog. — William S. Burroughs

He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living ... it may be only a few seconds ... a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime ... — William S. Burroughs

Junk is the ideal product ... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy. — William S. Burroughs

If I knew how much you loved me, I would've shot you sooner. — William S. Burroughs

The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable. — William S. Burroughs

He kisses the D.S.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost teeth "inna thervith". "Please Boss Man. I'll wipe your ass, I'll wash out your dirty condoms, I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose ... — William S. Burroughs

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company. — William S. Burroughs

Man is a political animal' said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men. — William S. Burroughs

Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut. — William S. Burroughs

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective. — William S. Burroughs

I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South. — William S. Burroughs

There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves. — William S. Burroughs

If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data. — William S. Burroughs

We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place. — William S. Burroughs

You see, control can never be a means to any practical end ... It can never be a means to anything but more control ... like junk.. — William S. Burroughs

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 much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution. — 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

The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time ... — William S. Burroughs

I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in ... the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer. — William S. Burroughs

I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. — William S. Burroughs

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. — William S. Burroughs

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. — William S. Burroughs

Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you. — William S. Burroughs

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. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
(Interview, The Paris Review) — William S. Burroughs

Piss off Satan and don't take me for dumber than I look. — William S. Burroughs

You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone. — William S. Burroughs

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments. — William S. Burroughs

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction. — William S. Burroughs

I was never tempted by any political program... I don't want to hear about the fucking masses and I never did. — William S. Burroughs

My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually. — William S. Burroughs

I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are. — William S. Burroughs