William S. Burroughs quote: "All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody. . . . All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you."

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are fu...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling b...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

And if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around t...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wip...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. T...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
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...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner spa...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

A functioning police state needs no police.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The face of evil is always the face of total need.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The questio...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been r...
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

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most ef...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will craw...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my g...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to w...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they h...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too pr...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, becaus...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be don...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstor...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be d...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in sil...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it....
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Language is a virus from outer space.
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

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself see...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hr...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked i...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implemen...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other,...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom... Make no mistake, all intellectua...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Junk is the ultimate merchandise. The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he se...
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

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The Pusher always gets it all back.
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

Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rise...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk,...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple st...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of th...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In fact, they recapitulate the story of Christianity word for word, like the inevitable course of so...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

When I say madness I mean what I see in a nut house: beat, resigned, dim, diffuse, nowhere people. N...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different an...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

(1) Never give anything away for nothing. (2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch th...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Never give succor to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way with...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

My experience as an addict was very useful to me as writer: the whole syndrome of addiction and with...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a d...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he us...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

A Nazi initiation into the upper reaches of the SS was to gouge out the eye of a pet cat after feedi...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

When you stop growing you start dying.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

To put it country simple. Earth has a lot of things other folks might want, like the whole planet. A...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I dont care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether th...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether t...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to t...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Junkies have no interest in sex and they have no interest in other people except as suppliers of jun...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

To his secretary after a visit from Kurt Cobain, "There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns f...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no sec...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom. Make no mistake; all intellectuals ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? ''And here is my...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a th...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

NAKED Lunch -- a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The only possible ETHIC is to do what one wants to do.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks fo...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I was new in the game and like all young thieves thought I had a license to steal. It didn't last.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but ima...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way with...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle eve...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The youth rebellion [1968] is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

He considered that immortality was the only goal worth striving for. He knew it was not something yo...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and to...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony. People have goofed or we wouldn't be here.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

All the role models are being exposed and this is good because role models are shit. The quicker we ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute,
& if they are cute the...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some larg...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking the...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugl...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

All the filth and horror, fear, hate disease and death of human history flows between you and the We...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Writers don't write, they read and transcribe.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I don't make myself work. It's just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to kno...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

We gotta find a way off this goddamn cop-ridden planet.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit w...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL think...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas . . . a cosmonaut of inner sp...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is . . . LOVE.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The questio...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Nothing is true, everything is permitted
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the c...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of fink...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's jus...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: the Mark Inside.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel s...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a to...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and pena...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, be...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstor...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base....
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

They are all stupid peasants, and the worst of all peasants are the so-called educated. These people...
WILLIAM S BURROUGHS

Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someo...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any str...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.
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, wo...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunc...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
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 fr...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, a...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent c...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Exterminate all rational thought
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

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

The aim of education is the knowledge, not the facts, but of values.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Did I ever tell you about the man
who taught his asshole to talk?

His whole abdomen ...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." Th...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Hemingway said:
'It don't come anymore.'
So where did it go?
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody. . . . All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you.

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William S. Burroughs

All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody. . . . All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you.

William S. Burroughs

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