If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and repeat the sequence. You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around your own apartment?


William S. Burroughs

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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