Top 300 William S. Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.”

— William S. Burroughs

153. “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

154. “You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.”

— William S. Burroughs

155. “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

156. “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

157. “If you weren’t surprised by your life you wouldn’t be alive. Life is surprise.”

— William S. Burroughs

158. “Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.”

— William S. Burroughs

159. “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

160. “Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.”

— William S. Burroughs

161. “Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.”

— William S. Burroughs

162. “Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”

— William S. Burroughs

163. “Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.”

— William S. Burroughs

164. “The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead.”

— William S. Burroughs

165. “Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.”

— William S. Burroughs

166. “I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink...”

— William S. Burroughs

167. “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

168. “A paranoid man is a man with all the facts.”

— William S. Burroughs

169. “The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time...”

— William S. Burroughs

170. “Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.”

— William S. Burroughs

171. “Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.”

— William S. Burroughs

172. “Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.”

— William S. Burroughs

173. “Pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming or raising frogs.”

— William S. Burroughs

174. “The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.”

— William S. Burroughs

175. “A junkie spends half his life waiting.”

— William S. Burroughs

176. “Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”

— William S. Burroughs

177. “The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers.”

— William S. Burroughs

178. “Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.”

— William S. Burroughs

179. “We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.”

— William S. Burroughs

180. “The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments.”

— William S. Burroughs

181. “My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.”

— William S. Burroughs

182. “Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.”

— William S. Burroughs

183. “Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.”

— William S. Burroughs

184. “I don’t think anyone could write a completely honest autobiography. I am sure no one could bear to read it: My Past Was An Evil River.”

— William S. Burroughs

185. “The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible.”

— William S. Burroughs

186. “Successful control means achieving a balance and avoiding a showdown where all-out force would be necessary.”

— William S. Burroughs

187. “Once the law starts asking questions, there’s no stopping them.”

— William S. Burroughs

188. “In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long.”

— William S. Burroughs

189. “Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay.”

— William S. Burroughs

190. “Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind?”

— William S. Burroughs

191. “Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.”

— William S. Burroughs

192. “Your plan was unworkable then and useless now... Like da Vinci’s flying machine plans...”

— William S. Burroughs

193. “Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.”

— William S. Burroughs

194. “If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.”

— William S. Burroughs

195. “In many tenement apartments the front door opens directly into the kitchen. This was such an apartment and we were in the kitchen.”

— William S. Burroughs

196. “I spit on the Christian God. When the White God arrived with the Spaniards, the Indians brought down fruit and corncakes and chocolate. The White Christian God proceeded to cut their hands off. He was not responsible for the Christian conquistadors? Yes, he was. Any God is responsible for his worshippers.”

— William S. Burroughs

197. “No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he’s got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.”

— William S. Burroughs

198. “I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.”

— William S. Burroughs

199. “Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.”

— William S. Burroughs

200. “We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.”

— William S. Burroughs