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William S. Burroughs

106 quotes

“Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness," the introduction to the 1960 edition, pp. 199-201
“Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You see control can never be a means to any practical end. ... Control can never be a means to anything but more control ... like Junk.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. 'The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.'”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At all levels the drug trade operates without without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hour-glass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he make his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen... Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean friends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movements. The black wind of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve... Populations blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide... Any number can play...”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Soft Machine (1961)
“Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you board syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consumated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn forever-”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will tell you: "'the word.'" Alien Word 'the.' "'The word'" of Alien Enemy imprisons "'thee'" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah 'rub out the word forever' If you I cancel all your words forever. And the of Hassan i Sabbah as also cancel. Cross all your skies see the silent writing of Brion Gysin Hassan i Sabbah: drew September 16, 1899 over New York.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Peoples of the earth, you have all been poisoned.' Convert all available stocks of morphine to apomorphine. Chemists, work round the clock on variation and synthesis of the apomorphine formulae.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In 'Naked Lunch', 'Soft Machine' and 'Nova Express' I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to 'come out'. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly-”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate.’”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before my father started using morphine again he sent me to a Japanese person to learn something called Karate. I learn these things fast because I am blank inside, and I have no special way of moving or doing things so one way is the same to me as another. ‘”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I saw the Colonel empty his revolver and go down under ten wild boys. A moment later they tossed his bleeding head into the air and started a ball game. Just at dusk the wild boys got up and padded away. They left the bodies stripped to the skin many with genitals cut off. The wild boys make little testicles in which they carry their hasish and khat.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee's affection irritated him. Like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time. He had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. "Someday I am going to have things just like I want," he said to himself. "And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the progress of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetic to geometric progressive seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stupid people can learn a language quiet and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many so called primitives are afraid of cameras. They think it can capture their soul and take it away. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, sexual intensity, a sexual intensity of pursuit.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mexico city is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not struck; by the fact of being there at all, you are traveling. But in Panama, crossroads of the world, you are exactly so much aging tissue. You have to make arrangements with Pan Am or the Dutch Line for removal of your body. Otherwise, it would stay there and rot in muggy heat, under a galvanized iron roof.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sit down on your ass, or what's left of it after four years in the navy.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Youth rebellion is a world wide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I don't believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the establishment would like to believe. Millions of young people all over the world are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a young child Audrey Carsons wanted to be writers because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No job too dirty for a fucking scientist.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consider the impasse of a one-God universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can't go anywhere, since He is already everywhere. He can't do anything, since the act of doing presupposes opposition. His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic, having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death, to keep his dying show on the road.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ch. 5, as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), pg. 234
“After teaching a class in Creative Writing a few years back, my own creative powers fell to an all-time low. I really had a case of writer's block, and my idealistic young assistant complained that I simply sat around the loft doing absolutely nothing; which was absolutely true. This gave me time to think (as the French say): Can creative writing be taught?”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My advice is to get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can't eat fame. And you can't write unless you want to write, and you can't want to unless you feel like it.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All modern systems are riddled with contradictions.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Concession is another control bind. History shows that once a government starts to make concessions it is on a one-way street.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
“When a certain stage of responsibility and awareness has been reached by a young banker he is taken to a room lined with family portraits in the middle of which is an ornate gilded toilet. Here he comes every day to defecate surrounded by the family portraits until he realizes that money is shit. And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. There was a time when the machine ate in moderation from a plentiful larder and what it ate was replaced. Now the machine is eating faster.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (1966) by Burroughs with Daniel Odier, p. 73; as quoted in Word cultures : radical theory and practice in William S. Burroughs' fiction (1987) by Robin Lydenberg, p. 146
“You are a Shit Spotter. It's satisfying work. ... We have observed that most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty percent of folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a diagnostic distinction between the hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don't cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Place Of Dead Roads‎ (1983), p. 155
“A lot of people made quick easy money during the War and for several years after. Any business was good, just as any stock is good on a rising market. People thought they were sharp operators, when actually they were just riding a lucky streak. Now the Valley is in a losing streak and only the big operators can ride it out. In the Valley economic laws work out like a formula in high school algebra, since there is no human element to interfere. The very rich are getting richer and all the others are going broke. The big holders are not shrewd or ruthless or enterprising. They don't have to say or think anything. All they have to do is sit and the money comes pouring in. You have to get up with the Big Holders or drop out and take any job they hand you. The middle class is getting the squeeze, and only one in a thousand will go up. The Big Holders are the house, and the small farmers are the players. The player goes broke if he keeps on playing, and the farmer has to play or lose to the Government by default.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper—have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls ... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish ... New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel ... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source