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


William S. Burroughs

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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS There is no such thing as a bottomless pit. If it were bottomless, it would not be a pit. The only t...
RON BRACKIN Law is a bottomless pit.
JOHN ARBUTHNOT During this period of his life, Burroughs was seeking a physical utopia, a place where he could live...
GREG A. MULLINS The problem with satisfaction is it's a bottomless pit
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Failure is a bottomless pit ready to devour you. If you always look up and never look down, failure ...
FOLASHADE' AYANWALE Law is a Bottomless-Pit, it is a Cormorant, a Harpy, that devours every thing.
JOHN ARBUTHNOT Law is a Bottomless-Pit, it is a Cormorant, a Harpy, that devours every thing
JOHN ARBUTHNOT But it's also a bottomless pit for story ideas.
FRED GOSS When you start off acting, it does seem very romantic, and the make-believe part of it all seems ver...
SADA THOMPSON Things can get only so bad. People want to eat, so at some point they resist further cuts to their c...
EDMUND PHELPS America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely ment...
JONI MITCHELL He should have been dragged through streets ... and thrown into a bottomless pit.
FERDONE QERKEZI And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great fu...
BIBLE Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without...
ERICH FROMM We all know stocks are starting to look cheap. But it's like staring into a bottomless pit right now...
KAZUYUKI NAITO And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew to...
BIBLE It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER I have plenty of vanity in my life. I want to look pretty in the world. But it can be this bottomles...
CLAIRE DANES Every time you feel like mocking a person you disagree with politically by implying that they are me...
ARIEL HOWLAND The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one...
ROBERT MUSIL Dwelling in the PAST is like jumping from a vertiginous height and landing on a bottomless pit… a ...
HEARTTOHEART THOUGHTS Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundament...
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN, JR. It is now no mystery that some quite influential ‘philosophers’ were ‘mentally’ ill.
ALFRED KORZYBSKI It is now no mystery that some quite influential ‘philosophers’ were ‘mentally’ ill.
ALFRED KORZYBSKI The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into ...
BIBLE I have seen the cycle of a non-violent, mentally ill offender who is arrested repeatedly and put int...
MIKE DEWINE Consumers have clearly shown a willingness to pay for content, but no consumer has a bottomless pit ...
TIM HANLON when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS It's a culmination of 50 years of our strong commitment to the mentally ill.
FRED SLUNECKA The love you get, is equal to the love you give.
BEN OAK I am excited about the impact I pray it has. I hope it is helpful and reveals the unnecessary suffer...
LUCY WINER Thy designs are a bottomless pit. How can I descend into this pit to examine it? Thou lookest thousa...
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS To kill for fun is the job of the psychopaths! And what is a matador, apart from being a mentally il...
MEHMET MURAT ILDAN A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, an...
KING JAMES I A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, an...
JAMES I OF ENGLAND When he entered the anteroom, two women looked up at him. One was Miss Robertson, the governor's sec...
GEORGE P. ELLIOTT In spurts we played well. But overall we have to play a lot better if we're going to win Friday (aga...
DERRICK DELTON I think that every young person is a little mentally ill, you know? If we're not totally shuttin...
GABY HOFFMANN Don't worry, everyone is mentally ill, they just haven’t figured out a name for yours yet.
CHRIS SPRUDZ When a man wrote a political screed against the IRS and flew into its building, he was deemed mental...
HAMZA YUSUF Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental f...
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN JR. Obviously, we think it's important to make sure that firearms do not get in the hands of people ...
ASA HUTCHINSON I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank...
JALINA MHYANA I am not mentally ill, I AM mentally well. I am not mentally handicapped, I AM more and less mentall...
JOHN RICHARD COWGILL He was possibly mentally ill, though he had never been diagnosed, inside or outside of prison. He wa...
CHERYL WHEELER It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particuarly long to learn that for yourself. Ther...
NEIL GAIMAN An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fil...
LUNDY BANCROFT Money-giving is a very good criterion of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mental...
KARL MENNINGER, DR. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one bo...
ROBERT WILSON Here is a mental treatment guaranteed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to: sit for half an hour ...
CHARLES FILLMORE Ay me! For aught that I could every read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course o...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Some of them are just down on their luck, but a lot are mentally ill.
ANDREW STUART Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ Though it be honest, it is never good To bring bad news; give to a gracious message An host of...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news: give to a gracious message an host of tongu...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE No power on earth or above the bottomless pit has such influence to terrorize and make cowards of me...
ELIZA ''MOTHER'' STEWART I was thrilled when this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature went to Ne...
JOHN COREY WHALEY Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those t...
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those t...
EDWARD GEORGE BULWER-LYTTON Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those t...
EDWARD G. BULWER-LYTTON 35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give...
JAMES C. DOBSON We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-...
DAVID SHIELDS The secret of our success is that we never, never give up.
WILMA MANKILLER When I heard the royal family wanted to have me perform in celebration of Prince William's marri...
SNOOP DOGG Was she mentally ill? Yes? Does this rise to the level of insanity? No. All they are giving you is a...
BILL DOBIYANSKI I love the ideas of looking back to historical heroes to give us inspiration on how we can be today&...
KIRK CAMERON Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunc...
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS I give thee what is most my own - A Dedication by Francis William Bourdillon
FRANCIS WILLIAM BOURDILLON The Games is a great challenge, both mentally and physically. [The crowds] give me butterflies just ...
KIRSTY GALLACHER Burroughs was a very political writer.
KATHY ACKER I never like it when a celebrity goes on Twitter and says, 'This isn't true!' It is what...
HARRY STYLES I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would m...
MOHANDAS GANDHI All dogs can become aggressive, but the difference between an aggressive Chihuahua and an aggressive...
CESAR MILLAN It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN He was not a mentally ill person, raging out of control. He's a calculating individual who waited fo...
LAWRENCE MURPHY The saying sell all your belongings & give to the poor simply means "Redirect your mind to the verit...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been wi...
DOUGLAS ADAMS His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING I will meet you in the next three days. In the name of God Almighty, I proclaim the end of the world...
MEHMET ALI AğCA I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - ...
STEPHEN KING It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU I was born William. My father was William. I came from a big family, I hated being called Billy. Wil...
WILLEM DAFOE Getting people on the right medications and keeping them on it is important. Mentally ill people ten...
LEE WOODLAND A tooth for a tooth, will make the world's inhabitants a people without teeth
SOTONYE ANGA Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say...
HILARY MANTEL You release the pain of the past and press on. It's a new day, and God is doing a new thing. He want...
CRAIG GROESCHEL Texas is a great place to be rich and a terrible place to be poor. It's got the highest percenta...
GAIL COLLINS The most important thing when ill, is to never lose heart.
LENIN (VLADIMIR ULYANOV) The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.
VLADIMIR ILICH ULIANOV The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.
VLADIMIR LENIN The most important thing when ill, is to never lose heart.
VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN The mosh pit will reveal all the answers. The mosh pit never lies.

-Norah, Nick & Nor...
RACHEL COHN I'm not seen as mentally ill in the community anymore. I'm not the homeless woman anymore. I'm funct...
BARBARA LINDSAY Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM Unless they're a fugitive or a felon, or adjudicated mentally ill, we're not against them bu...
SARAH BRADY Time determines the occurrence of possibilities and impossibilities, but God determines the time for...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH Nowadays, it's hard to find the best horror and to be interesting and to be afraid of it!
DEYTH BANGER You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them... ...
RYAN COOGLER It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill- it's a life which, to put it mildly, mak...
VINCENT VAN GOGH

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 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