William S. Burroughs Quotes
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101. “As an old junk pusher told me, ‘Watch whose money you pick up.’”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

103. “There’s a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.”

— William S. Burroughs

104. “I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.”

— William S. Burroughs

105. “Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass.”

— William S. Burroughs

106. “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

107. “Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.”

— William S. Burroughs

108. “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

109. “If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.”

— William S. Burroughs

110. “The face of evil is always the face of total need.”

— William S. Burroughs

111. “Like Spain, I am bound to the past.”

— William S. Burroughs

112. “Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.”

— William S. Burroughs

113. “A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.”

— William S. Burroughs

114. “There is no line between the ‘real world’ and ‘world of myth and symbol.’ Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.”

— William S. Burroughs

115. “Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.”

— William S. Burroughs

116. “By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.”

— William S. Burroughs

117. “O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...”

— William S. Burroughs

118. “Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.”

— William S. Burroughs

119. “When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. – A user is a continual state of shrinking and growing in his daily cycle of shot-need for shot completed.”

— William S. Burroughs

120. “Modern man has lost the option of silence.”

— William S. Burroughs

121. “When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.”

— William S. Burroughs

122. “After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.”

— William S. Burroughs

123. “If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.”

— William S. Burroughs

124. “Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.”

— William S. Burroughs

125. “In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.”

— William S. Burroughs

126. “People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.”

— William S. Burroughs

127. “Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. “I don’t have any whiskey,” may be a fact but it is not a truth.”

— William S. Burroughs

128. “You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”

— William S. Burroughs

129. “When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light...”

— William S. Burroughs

130. “You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

132. “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

133. “He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.”

— William S. Burroughs

134. “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves.”

— William S. Burroughs

135. “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...”

— William S. Burroughs

136. “The Planet drifts to random insect doom.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

138. “We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.”

— William S. Burroughs

139. “In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.”

— William S. Burroughs

140. “I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

142. “That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.”

— William S. Burroughs

143. “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”

— William S. Burroughs

144. “Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time.”

— William S. Burroughs

145. “I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?”

— William S. Burroughs

146. “Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties.”

— William S. Burroughs

147. “Why are we here? We’re here to go!”

— William S. Burroughs

148. “First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother.”

— William S. Burroughs

149. “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

150. “Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.”

— William S. Burroughs