William S. Burroughs Quotes

Language is a virus from outer space.

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Open your mind and let the pictures out

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.

in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

A functioning police state needs no police.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.

I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.