William S. Burroughs Quotes
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Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.
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According to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself God and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescent image. The boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. This angered God, who was getting on in years. He decided it endangered his position as CREATOR. So he crept upon the boy and anaesthetized him and made Eve from his rib. Henceforth all creation of beings would process through female channels. But some of Adam's phantoms refused to let God near them under any pretext.
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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
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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.
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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
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Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
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If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it.
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Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
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There are no innocent bystanders.
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Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
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When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.
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A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
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O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.
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If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.
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Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?
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Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
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Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through.
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I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
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Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.
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Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.
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Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any f...ing thing.
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When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.
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The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.
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Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?
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My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
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Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.
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Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel.
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Time is what death needs to grow people in.
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The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
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The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.
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