Top 300 William S. Burroughs Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

160. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

162. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

165. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

171. “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

172. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

174. “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

175. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

178. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

181. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

183. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

187. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

191. “All you cat lovers, remember all the millions of cats mewling through the world’s rooms lay all their hopes and trust in you.”

— William S. Burroughs

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “Kafka speaks of the point of no return. This is the most difficult of all points to reach. The game is called Find Your Adversary. The Adversary’s game plan is to persuade you that he does not exist. “Why all the paranoia?” This is only one of his game plans. You find out he exists, and you are still a long way from confrontation, a long way. A dreary abrasive dull way, sad voices, dirtier, older.”

— William S. Burroughs

196. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs