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


William S. Burroughs

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when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ''I want to see the manager.''
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Aut viam inveniam aut faciam tibi.

I will either find a way or make one.
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We had been working with Prince William County officials to find a family.
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Ay me! For aught that I could every read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
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Before we find world peace, we gotta find peace in the war on the streets.
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Burroughs was a very political writer.
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Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunc...
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Are we gonna eliminate every instance of that? I don't know. I mean, we gotta step into this new wor...
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To cop-out, is not a way to cope.
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Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one bo...
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We were all novices. We really were. We didn't know a goddamn thing about doing a show.
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To find a prince, you gotta kiss some toads.
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I gotta find him for you.
JAMES NEILSON
This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.
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You need a droughtbreaker, baby. Gotta go find yo'self a rainmaker.
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Some people argue we should solve all the problems on Earth before going off the planet, but that...
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Everybody in this family gets his goddamn religion in a different package.
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We created points off our press in the first half, but we have to find a way to hit open shots.
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Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
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The Pusher always gets it all back.
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You gotta make a change. Its time for us as a people to start making some changes, lets change the w...
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Get off your ass and get down here to fix the goddamn biggest disaster in the nation's history.
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You have a kid, and it's like, 'He's gotta go to college! Gotta have some clothes!'
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I pictured Cupid sitting in a crappy little bar, drunk and depressed, while he moaned to the bartend...
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I'm learning something all the time. That's the way I want it to go, and that's the way ...
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A cop pulled me over and told me "Papers", so I said "Scissors, I win!" and drove off.
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We?ll find out about Pat later this week and Mike?s hamstring has not responded to rehab the way we ...
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That was too goddamn long. They just gabbed and gabbed. There are so many bad movies out there. They...
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Where's the goddamn f***ing flag? I want the goddamn f***ing flag up every f***ing morning at f***in...
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Get off my planet, you son of a bitch.
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First, I'm trying to edit down about 7 hours of material which I made prior to the Cop days and ...
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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are fu...
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A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling b...
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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
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And if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing.
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I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around t...
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You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.
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America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wip...
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America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. T...
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Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
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There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
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Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his...
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In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner spa...
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A functioning police state needs no police.
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Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer ...
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I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
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Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an...
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Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic s...
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My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been r...
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.
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Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most ef...
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Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will craw...
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Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my g...
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The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to w...
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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they h...
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Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too pr...
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Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, becaus...
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So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be don...
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A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstor...
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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...
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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...
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They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some ...
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There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, s...
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Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that...
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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...
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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

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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.
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Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, becaus...
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No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure...
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Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that...
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You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in sil...
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An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
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The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don...
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Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
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Language is a virus from outer space.
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager....
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Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
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The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.
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The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
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Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller.
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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...
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Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
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In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, ...
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My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.
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You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
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Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
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If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hr...
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Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked i...
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Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implemen...
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I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a ...
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Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters...
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Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other,...
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Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until...
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In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom... Make no mistake, all intellectua...
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Junk is the ultimate merchandise. The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he se...
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to see the manager."
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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.
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The Pusher always gets it all back.
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ''I want to see the manager.''
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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...
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If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk,...
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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.
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Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way with...
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When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.
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My experience as an addict was very useful to me as writer: the whole syndrome of addiction and with...
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There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a d...
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The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he us...
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The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol ...
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A Nazi initiation into the upper reaches of the SS was to gouge out the eye of a pet cat after feedi...
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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
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When you stop growing you start dying.
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To put it country simple. Earth has a lot of things other folks might want, like the whole planet. A...
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I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether th...
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England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's...
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I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether t...
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I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to t...
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The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don...
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Junkies have no interest in sex and they have no interest in other people except as suppliers of jun...
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No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls.
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To his secretary after a visit from Kurt Cobain, "There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns f...
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If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no sec...
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In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom. Make no mistake; all intellectuals ...
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Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
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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...
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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
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