There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some large goldfish I bought in a bait store. The cats are always trying to catch the fish, with no success. One time the white cat leapt for a frog across the pool. The frog dove in and the cat fell in. He is trouble-prone.


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

I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willing...
J.G. BALLARD
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
Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
RICHARD CARLSON
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
She was intimidating and all I could do was sit back on the couch as she paced back and forth, slowl...
IN THE MAKING
Now is the only time we have, and the only time we have any control over.
RICHARD CARLSON
He wept because he was afraid now that he could not save Gabriel. He no longer cared about himself
LOIS LOWRY
In the beginning, there was nothing and from nothing came our species then behold the dawn of music....
GARY F EVANS...
We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives.
THICH NHAT HANH
His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING
When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself.
MANDY HALE
Dive into the river of the present, but don't thrash about, go with the flow.
JIM GENOVESE
There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and tr...
BONES THE DOCTOR IN THE PHOTO
I've told you I don't live and die by the polls. Thus, I will refrain from pointing out that we're n...
, IN THE NEW REPUBLIC
I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and b...
LYDIA MILLET
God is not impressed with what PRECEDES your name, but how you PROCEED in His Name."
BJ NELSON
When Luke had descended into the River Styx, he would've had to focus on something important that wo...
RICK RIORDAN
In the beginning it was all black and white.
MAUREEN O'HARA
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
No, of course not. But surely you know your affair couldn't go on forever."
"Forever has no mea...
ELLEN HOPKINS
A perfectly decent fellow may be driven by circumstances to commit a crime and if he's found out he'...
W.SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Let me repeat. I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had ti...
WILLIAM FAULKNER
I hate saying corny things like "traveling incognito." But when I'm with somebody that's corny, I al...
J.D. SALINGER
“Love is not to be discovered but felt.It is brewing in air across universe.One needs only open ey...
ANUJ SOMANY
I promise myself that I will enjoy every minute of the day that is given me to live.
THICH NHAT HANH
You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have is...now.
JAY ASHER
Life is a journey, not a destination.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
It is so torturous to be in the crowd not only because the voice there is usually loud, but also oft...
ANUJ SOMANY
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...
It seems like all the best people have all the worst habits.
THOMAS WALLACE SCHERZER
A person who lives truly in present time is dependent on oneself only not on sycophants’ people.
ANUJ SOMANY
I had a best friend once 20 years down the line a friendship that you just do not get now, i regarde...
GARY F EVANS...
Tongues are a miraculous manifestations of being filled with the Holy Ghost.
PST ADELAJA SUNDAY
The Buddha told him, "When we sit, we know we are sitting. When we walk, we know we are walking. Whe...
THICH NHAT HANH
She plucked the blossoms from the bag and arranged them, one by one, in the water glass on her dress...
SARAH JIO
Tomorrow is tomorrow.
Future cares have future cures,
And we must mind today.
SOPHOCLES
To him, even the momentary was momentous.
G.K. CHESTERTON
‎You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the...
JAN GLIDEWELL
I’m pretty sure there are some things in the dark that we’re not meant to see.
KARINA HALLE
I know,” said November. He was pale and thin lipped. He helped October out of the wooden chair. �...
NEIL GAIMAN
That’s what I liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere...
J.D. SALINGER
Wake up to a brand new day and realize why you woke up to meet the day! Live to the end of another d...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
Savor the moment. Set a goal that you value and plan the steps to of getting there in a way that you...
TERENCE T. GORSKI
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
The mark of a real man, is a man who can allow himself to fall deeply in love with a woman. But the ...
C. JOYBELL C.
It's not easy being green.
KERMIT THE FROG
Someday we'll find it, that rainbow connection,
the lovers the dreamers and me.
KERMIT THE FROG
Well, you know, it's interesting being 50, ... You start to reflect on your life. And you look back ...
KERMIT THE FROG
I'd have to say one of the memorable ones was probably the first guest we had, which was Juliet Prow...
KERMIT THE FROG
Someday we'll find it, that rainbow connection, the lovers the dreamers and me.
KERMIT THE FROG
Time's fun when you're having flies.
KERMIT THE FROG
Mother Superior jump the gun...
-The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gun
LAUREN MYRACLE
The things i know now, i never knew then. I wish i knew.
SOTONYE ANGA
Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.
GEORGE A. MOORE
The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a...
JEANETTE CORON
An emotionally locked person refuses to let go of their sad memories and live in the now.
KILROY J. OLDSTER
It was frustrating to still be in the dark about something and be given only so little light.
LAUREN LOLA
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That dep...
LEWIS CARROLL
Now i know what it feels like being Ryan Bingham
ARIEL SERAPHINO
To have the time to reminisce is one of the futures gifts. Don't think to much, don't live to fast, ...
CALVIN WILSON
We are the masters of our own destinies we shape and mould our lives into to the circumstances surro...
GARY F EVANS...
To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you r...
MANDY HALE
Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.
SHARON SALZBERG
I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud
NEIL GAIMAN
He called out to his fellow monks,'Come quickly I am tasting stars.
JOHN GREEN
We begin to fight. The wind and I. Horns locked. Battling each other with elements.
LAURA DOCKRILL
The universe is a gathering of nows that I spread before my feet like a landscape.
JANET TURPIN MYERS
There is no greater glory than to die for love.
GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ
Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nasti...
GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ
She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. S...
GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ
You've never really trusted him, though you don't understand why. Something about the fact that he's...
N.K. JEMISIN
A knowledge of Persian will aid a traveler in these countries [Turkmenistan]; but the Toorkey [Turki...
A MAJOR IN THE BRITISH ARMY
Never give up on you. In order to make a difference you would have to somehow be different.
JOHNNIE DENT JR.
All the things that are in the past are in the past.
PABLO SANDOVAL
What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is s...
JOHN GREEN
What day is it?"
It's today," squeaked Piglet.
My favorite day," said Pooh.
A.A. MILNE
And let me tell you something else, my friend," she said in the precise enunciation of a trained nur...
JAMES JONES
Be present in all things and thankful for all things.
MAYA ANGELOU
Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is yo...
BETTY SMITH
Pero diré esto: Cuando los científicos del futuro aparezcan en mi casa con ojos robot y me digan q...
JOHN GREEN
I hate saying corny things like 'traveling incognito.' But when I' with somebody that's corny, I alw...
J.D. SALINGER
Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, ...
IDA SCOTT TAYLOR MCKINNEY
Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there...
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The only way to survive eternity is to be able to appreciate each moment.
LAUREN KATE
Better to play dumb than to go as smartass… after all smartasses get what they deserve in the end....
DEYTH BANGER
Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things...
ELIZABETH VON ARNIM
Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to to...
JERRY SPINELLI
How can something feel so crucial in the moment and then seem completely trivial after the fact?
PAULA STOKES
There's no sustenance in the past.
VIOLETTE LEDUC
Mindfulness is like that—it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and r...
THICH NHAT HANH
To live in the present, you need to act or accept but never stay stuck.
JOHN KUYPERS
Wow,” I said. “Are you making this up?”
“Hazel Grace, could I, with my meager intellect...
JOHN GREEN
Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the St...
JOHN GREEN
We were sitting there on the couch together, and he pushed himself up to go but then fell back down ...
JOHN GREEN
So it’s your death suit.”
“Correct. Don’t you have a death outfit?”
“Yeah,”...
JOHN GREEN
I spent your Wish on that doucheface,” I said into his chest.
“Hazel Grace. No. I will gran...
JOHN GREEN

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
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