Top 300 William S. Burroughs Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible.”

— William S. Burroughs

52. “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.”

— William S. Burroughs

53. “Life is a vacation from two eternities.”

— William S. Burroughs

54. “I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.”

— William S. Burroughs

55. “Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.”

— William S. Burroughs

56. “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.”

— William S. Burroughs

57. “A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.”

— William S. Burroughs

58. “Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.”

— William S. Burroughs

59. “Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.”

— William S. Burroughs

60. “Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: ‘For God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you.’”

— William S. Burroughs

61. “It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.”

— William S. Burroughs

62. “Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.”

— William S. Burroughs

63. “Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?”

— William S. Burroughs

64. “Paranoia is just having the right information.”

— William S. Burroughs

65. “Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.”

— William S. Burroughs

66. “How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.”

— William S. Burroughs

67. “It’s the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

69. “After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager.’”

— William S. Burroughs

70. “Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.”

— William S. Burroughs

71. “I’m creating an imaginary – it’s always imaginary – world in which I would like to live.”

— William S. Burroughs

72. “Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.”

— William S. Burroughs

73. “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

74. “There isn’t a feeling you can get on drugs that you can’t get without drugs.”

— William S. Burroughs

75. “My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.”

— William S. Burroughs

76. “Cats didn’t start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.”

— William S. Burroughs

77. “It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.”

— William S. Burroughs

78. “The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.”

— William S. Burroughs

79. “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.”

— William S. Burroughs

80. “The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

— William S. Burroughs

81. “Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.”

— William S. Burroughs

82. “In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”

— William S. Burroughs

83. “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.”

— William S. Burroughs

84. “If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.”

— William S. Burroughs

85. “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”

— William S. Burroughs

86. “When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.”

— William S. Burroughs

87. “Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”

— William S. Burroughs

88. “A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.”

— William S. Burroughs

89. “I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don’t mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.”

— William S. Burroughs

90. “Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.”

— William S. Burroughs

91. “You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.”

— William S. Burroughs

92. “Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”

— William S. Burroughs

93. “A functioning police state needs no police.”

— William S. Burroughs

94. “Well as, one judge said to the other, ‘Be just and if you can’t be just be arbitrary.’ Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.”

— William S. Burroughs

95. “Cuando uno deja de crecer empieza a morir.”

— William S. Burroughs

96. “Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.”

— William S. Burroughs

97. “Too perfect to be sexually attractive.”

— William S. Burroughs

98. “Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.”

— William S. Burroughs

99. “How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”

— William S. Burroughs

100. “I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”

— William S. Burroughs