In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh... Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones.


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

He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clou...
TOM ROBBINS
I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
Alan had loved her breakfast pastries best; Charlie craved her pies. He liked them true-blue America...
JULIA GLASS
Poaching white fish in moderately hot oil guarantees soft-textured flesh and allows you to prepare a...
YOTAM OTTOLENGHI
The air soft as that of Seville in April, and so fragrant that it was delicious to breathe it.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
He dragged his lips up the soft skin of her neck and gently nipped her ear lobe, sipping on the soft...
ANGELA QUARLES
By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.
BIBLE
It is because baptism is a real insertion of human beings into the ascended manhood of Christ that t...
E.L. MASCALL
He pushed himself a fraction deeper, still exploring his lazy rhythm. I could feel his thickness beg...
JULIETTE MILLER
Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked i...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
That wasn't his right track today with the soft conditions around Mooney Valley and I was happy with...
DAVID HAYES
His form was of the manliest beauty, His heart was kind and soft, Faithful, below, he did his ...
CHARLES DIBDIN
And Adam said, This is the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, bec...
BIBLE
In the beginning it was all black and white.
MAUREEN O'HARA
The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great that I thought I wa...
JACK KEROUAC
The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I w...
JACK KEROUAC
Drink." she whispered, drawing nearer. "Drink." she held the soft, tender flesh of the wrist towards...
ANNE RICE
He was a small person and very soft spoken, but he was a huge presence in the department and the uni...
GEORGE HERRING
I copied the address into my address book, erasing an earlier one that had not been good for very lo...
LYDIA DAVIS
The soft blue sky did never melt Into his heart; he never felt The witching of the soft blue s...
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
They buried him in dirt that smelled like broken batteries, and crouched in a fiberglass shed while ...
DAN WELLS
And Ishmael his son was thirteen years old, when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin.
BIBLE
His cloak was his crowning glory; sable, thick and black and soft as sin.
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
We went there for little practices and we were told that a soft ball match was being played, which n...
BOB WOOLMER
So mourn'd the dame of Ephesus her Love, And thus the Soldier arm'd with Resolution Told his s...
COLLEY CIBBER
Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and ...
DEXTER PALMER
His anger took many shapes: sometimes soft and familiar, like a round stone he had caressed for so l...
LAILA LALAMI
His breath like silver arrows pierced the air, The naked earth crouched shuddering at his feet, ...
FRANCES ANNE "FANNY" KEMBLE (MRS. BUTLER)
Fuck me,” I whispered, giving him permission, taking him into my flesh, a soft invitation to madne...
EMME ROLLINS
There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy ...
A.S. BYATT
We had two men to choose from, and Neil Armstrong, reticent, soft-spoken, and heroic was our only ch...
CHRIS KRAFT
An Indian's dress of deer skins, which is wet a hundred times upon his back, dries soft; and his...
GEORGE CATLIN
Cheney was among the best secretaries of defence the country has ever had. He was a very effective W...
BARTON GELLMAN
We gave up a soft goal in the second half and it was caused by indiscipline. No one was marking the ...
DR DEAN WEATHERLY
Variety is the food of the flesh.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The flesh still remains the flesh,irrespective of it's religious state,it's character never changes.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
And Abraham was ninety years old and nine, when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin.
BIBLE
White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott's suggestion of a trained nurse was indignantly clamour...
JACK LONDON
The raven once in snowy plumes was drest, White as the whitest dove's unsullied breast, Fair a...
OVID (PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO)
His muscles had wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so that each rib ...
JACK LONDON
Isabel felt soft and yielding; her blouse felt soft. Everything about her seemed soft, and she smell...
SUSAN WIGGS
I settled on the floor and whispered to Sam, “I want you to listen to me, if you can.” I leaned ...
MAGGIE STIEFVATER
I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
No pillows so soft as God's Promise.
ANON.
Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different tim...
MARGARET ATWOOD
Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that&...
MAYA ANGELOU
After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent c...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
You can't plan on hitting the ball soft. He threw it soft, so I hit it soft. They were catching the ...
EMIL BROWN
We got tentative there, because we kind of got soft both offensively and defensively.
CK HANSEN
No matter his joking, I thought, this was a man as given to the miseries as I was. You could look in...
FREDERICK BUSCH
He wasn't made of flesh and bone, or starlight.
He was made of darkness.
VICTORIA SCHWAB
Man is always in warfare with his flesh,for he wants one thing & his flesh wants another.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Catches everything that comes his way, has soft hands and great balance. He goes and gets the ball.
CLARK HAGGANS
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented real...
JULIAN BARNES
There is no accountability in soft money. None.
ZACK WAMP
Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. H...
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Christ of his gentleness, / Thirsting and hungering / Walked in the wilderness; / Soft words of grac...
ROBERT GRAVES
And as the circumcised in the flesh, and not in the heart, have no part in God's good promises; ...
WILLIAM TYNDALE
I opened the large central window of my office room to its full on the fine early May morning. Then ...
ANGUS WILSON
His lips tasted cool and sharp, peppermint, winter, but his hands, soft on the back of my neck, prom...
MAGGIE STIEFVATER
She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, sof...
MARKUS ZUSAK
There should be no soft bedding in the crib, ... As many as a third of the deaths from SIDS could ha...
ANN BROWN
Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's ...
HARPER LEE
And his hair was free, no ponytail, no braid, the long thickness of it waved and curled down his bac...
KRISTEN ASHLEY
She was here, with him, and she felt like heaven. The soft scent of her hair, the slight taste of sa...
JULIA QUINN
At birth, we are like cartilage - soft, flexible tissue. By the same natural process by which cartil...
IYANLA VANZANT
A habit leads a man so gently in the beginning that he does not perceive he is led - with what silke...
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
She was dry. She was lying on something soft. She was wrapped in quilts. There was a star of light d...
ERIN BOW
I don't know how long I've got to address the soft opponent thing. But Arizona is not soft.
LORENZO ROMAR
No one can overcome this lusty flesh by acting with gross overconfidence,but by humbly daily taming ...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The rampaging flesh;Beware!For the flesh during the teenage years is mostly looking for someone to d...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
If the flesh were to be a preacher the gospel it will love to preach is the gospel called variety.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The biggest burden we all carry in life is not the fear of death,but the fear of our unpredictable f...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Fear the lion,fear the crocodile,but fear most the one that puts on the inevitable wear called the h...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The most dangerous weapon in life is not the atomic bomb or the AK 47 riffle,but the human flesh.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
But for me the sweetest contact with God has no form. I close my eyes, look within, and enter a deep...
MICHAEL JACKSON
The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical tha...
POPE BENEDICT XVI
The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical tha...
JOSEPH RATZINGER
The children of the rich usually don't have strong determination to be rich,because they were born i...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
I'm used to the security of living behind my online profiles and the clip art advertisdements I crea...
KATIE KACVINSKY
The story in (the first quarter) was soft wireless margins.
DAVID BARDEN
I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank...
JALINA MHYANA
There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.
FRENCH PROVERB
There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience
FRENCH PROVERB
But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Life has played her like a cat weaving between her legs, pretending to be tame, friendly, before sin...
WENDY JAMES
He knelt down beside her and slowly rubbed a soft, muculent mix on her bare skin like a sculptor at ...
MIRETTE BAGHAT
He's looking at the wall and at the floor and at the bedsheets and at the way his knuckles look when...
TAHEREH MAFI
It was a cold morning, and he shivered a little; but he had been taught by his uncle that his prayer...
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
There's no pillow as soft as a clear conscience.
GLEN CAMPBELL
He'd broken his leg dropping down from the rooftop. The bone didn't set right, and he'd limped ever ...
LEIGH BARDUGO
He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentili...
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Do you know how to digest your food? Do you know how to fill your lungs with air? Do you know how to...
DONALD CURTIS
Do you know how to digest your food? Do you know how to fill your lungs with air? Do you know how to...
DONALD CURTIS
He looked at her. She was pretty still, with thick hair and soft eyes, and she moved so gracefully t...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
When he kissed me, his lips soft and careful, it was all the thrill of our first kiss and all the pr...
MAGGIE STIEFVATER
So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, an...
BIBLE
In soft regions are born soft men.
HERODOTUS
Flesh of thy flesh, nor yet bone of thy bone.
GUILLAUME DE SALLUSTE DU BARTAS
A broom that was almost never used was leaned up against the wall. He took it and started to sweep. ...
JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST

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
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 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
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