Top 300 William S. Burroughs Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”

— William S. Burroughs

102. “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

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. “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

105. “The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.”

— William S. Burroughs

106. “England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire.”

— William S. Burroughs

107. “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

108. “I’m an old-fashioned person, and I don’t like informers.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

111. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

114. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

116. “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

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

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

— William S. Burroughs

120. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

123. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

126. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

128. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

132. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

134. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

137. “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

138. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

146. “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.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

148. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs