Top 300 William S. Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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.”

— William S. Burroughs

103. “The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.”

— William S. Burroughs

104. “The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

106. “No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

108. “As an old junk pusher told me, ‘Watch whose money you pick up.’”

— William S. Burroughs

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

116. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

123. “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

124. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

127. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

132. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

134. “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

135. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

147. “Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

149. “I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs