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

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
Success is a Journey: so, don’t forget to pack your COURAGE: to face the obstacles heading your wa...
PHILIP T. M.
It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER
Time is a teacher which in the end it kills all it's students. (Synchronicity 2015 Film)
DEYTH BANGER
You're full of contradictions, Ms. Wallace."
I looked up at him and arched a brow. "I'm a girl...
TAMMARA WEBBER
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he sha...
FRANCINE RIVERS
The only thing I can cook is Welsh rarebit.
IAN RUSH
As I make my way through, I feel okayness reaching through me.
The funny thing is that okayness...
MARKUS ZUSAK
For starters, that’s a rather simple principle of Time Travel right there – and according to the...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
If I provide for this life and turn away from the Lord, I am wise for a moment, but lost forever.
FRANCINE RIVERS
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he sha...
FRANCINE RIVERS
You are an adult and you don't understand me and what are the differences between the adult and the ...
DEYTH BANGER
Cease to think of an impossibility and you will seize an opportunity for productivity. Excellence co...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Weird makes you truly sexy in a way the world can never know.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
If you can dream it, you can do it.
ENZO FERRARI
6 Ways To Give Your Mind A Break:

1. Stop stressing
2. Stop worrying
3. Give re...
GERMANY KENT
The king may rule the kingdom, but it's the queen who moves the board.
D.M. TIMNEY
All that the spider needs to complete its web is step taking
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
What's the difference between people who see and seek gaps and those that see and seek bridges? The ...
RICHIE NORTON
Be all that you can be.
You can be great.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
Do the thing and you will have the power.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
You can be all that you want to be.
Keep dreaming and reach out to your dreams.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
Renew your mind by washing it with truth: God's Word.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
Bravery breaks barriers! You were not born to be mediocre! Put on courage and conquer! Don’t forge...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
If a person is incapable of humbling themselves, the Universe will gladly pick up the task for them,...
ENRIQUE VEGA
The best thing you can do for your kids is to show them God working in you on a daily basis.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
Drop down someone else's shoe and run to take your own quickly. Don't hire your own to anybody, else...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Who you know only gets you in the door; what you know gets you the keys to the house.
GINA GREENLEE
What will make you a star is in you
SOTONYE ANGA
Nowadays, it's hard to find the best horror and to be interesting and to be afraid of it!
DEYTH BANGER
She was intimidating and all I could do was sit back on the couch as she paced back and forth, slowl...
IN THE MAKING
Everything known and referred to as “impossible” is often what has not been attempted before. It...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly long to learn that for yourself. Ther...
NEIL GAIMAN
This world is a joke, and I'm in it
OLIWAH GOUDEE
While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written w...
KINGMAN BREWSTER, JR.
Now i know what it feels like being Ryan Bingham
ARIEL SERAPHINO
You can coddle your rage, or you can fully engage.
TONY CLEAVER
A word is a magic thing. It holds the essence of an object or idea and pins it to the world. A word ...
KELLY BARNHILL
While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word ...
KINGMAN BREWSTER
Cham is the only thing to screw one up when one is down a peg.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
You silly," said Abdul, "those clouds don' mean nothing. I see'd them plenty a'ready. It was jus' co...
THEO ENGELA
If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.
VAN MORRISON
If you think you can do it, you can.
JOHN BURROUGHS
It ain't bragging if you can do it.
DIZZY DEAN
The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of flowing passion, but only those who are passi...
ADOLF HITLER
When you grow up there are things that you would love to do make your father proud is one and have f...
GARY F EVANS...
No, the sky, it is not a contest or an exam. The only question is, can you look up? Can you take it ...
CLARE VANDERPOOL
Word of mouth is the most valuable form of marketing, but you can't buy it. You can only deliver...
G-EAZY
He wept because he was afraid now that he could not save Gabriel. He no longer cared about himself
LOIS LOWRY
God walked with humanity in the cool of the day and gave them the most difficult and hottest parts o...
JOEY TALLADINO
You cannot do anything unless you allow your passion to motivate you. People may tell you, "you can ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
If you have a question, ask. How do you ask? Say it or write it
SOTONYE ANGA
He brings the greatest conflict into the history of mankind. He will come soon to our world just lik...
TOBA BETA
She would tuck Sam into her heart, a bright light for her to take out whenever things were darkest.
SARAH J. MAAS
The only thing I can do is play baseball. I have to play ball. It's the only thing I know.
MICKEY MANTLE
When I die it will be game over,... but I know one life is short, to be selfish is not the best deci...
DEYTH BANGER
If you can say it... it's obvious.
DEYTH BANGER
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically differe...
KARL MARX
We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kid...
KURT VONNEGUT
To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ...
GARY F EVANS...
I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know fr...
ROSE SCHNEIDERMAN
The value of routine; trusting your swing.
LORII MYERS
The only thing that matters is submitting to the will of God.
MUHAMMAD ALI
YOU are YOU! Know YOU can! YOU must not be afraid because God has a prosperous future plan for YOU! ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING
Most people my age are dead at the present time and you can look it up.
CASEY STENGEL
I have Tourettes and Aspergers, but Tourrets and Aspergers don't have me. You know, I'm doin...
JAMES DURBIN
All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I ...
SUFJAN STEVENS
In the beginning, there was nothing and from nothing came our species then behold the dawn of music....
GARY F EVANS...
The only thing you ever have is now.
ECKHART TOLLE
Just because you believe something was true in the past does not mean it will be true in the future.
JEFFREY FRY
After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent c...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON
It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN
Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
RICHARD CARLSON
It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe...
NORMAN MACLEAN
Just as water is the only thing that can relieve thirst in the desert, the provision of God's Word i...
JIM GEORGE
It is only when man cultivate humanness that society will shine with radiance and the nation and the...
SRI SATHYA SAI BABA
I speak the truth. Not everyone who says they are ready to hear it really are.
MONIKA ZANDS
Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more pos...
AUSTIN GROSSMAN
The best part of having a relationship is getting to call the person or lay down next to them and te...
TEGAN QUIN
Learn to appreciate every moment of your life, stop thinking of the future too much, you have a choi...
AULIQ ICE
We begin to fight. The wind and I. Horns locked. Battling each other with elements.
LAURA DOCKRILL
For all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably...
HOWARD FAST
It can be done. The only question is will this nasty virus give us the time.
ALEJANDRO THIERMANN
I question every word; I write 'the' and immediately feel scorn. It's such an ordinary w...
JEFF LINDSAY
The universe is so vast, so immense, we can never expect to explore it all. It is in effect, not so ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
The only thing that is obscene is censorship.
CRAIG BRUCE
The only thing I'm allergic to is criticism.
DAVID LEE ROTH
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.
VINCE LOMBARDI
The only thing I miss on stage is the falsetto.
BARRY GIBB
Rumor has it: when you marry a Walsh you are set for life. Only one thing can screw it up.
JESSICA GORDON
Enemies who vow not to see you achieve it and friends who say you can't do it... ARE THE SAME...!!! ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Death is the only thing that can not be explained truly. It is the only means for a true fallacy.
EPHDAN
I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud
NEIL GAIMAN
A clear passion, a resolute determination, a can-do spirit; these are the rods for creating a great ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives.
THICH NHAT HANH

More William S. Burroughs

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
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 don’t 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
All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody. . . . All knowledge all discoveries belong to you...
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