Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Disease, Advice
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: God
Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Pleasure
Junk is the ultimate merchandise. The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he degrades and simplifies the client.
—William S. Burroughs
Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Virtue
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Words
No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he’s got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Science, Physics
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Space
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Despair, Change
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
Topics: Authors & Writing
Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? “And here is my good big centipede!” If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
—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
Topics: Mankind, World, Man
Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
—William S. Burroughs
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Evil
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader’s full attention.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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 in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Authors & Writing
Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Science
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Universe, The Universe
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief… Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol—pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Inspiration, Inspirational
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
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Grief, Grieving
A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Psychiatry
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: America
Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Humility
The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn’t going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Obedience
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: America
There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Sex
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 want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: War
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Magic
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
Topics: Drugs
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Ken Kesey American Novelist
- Philip K. Dick American Novelist
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
- Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer
- Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
- Henry Adams American Historian
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich American Writer
Leave a Reply