William S. Burroughs Quotes
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151. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

154. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

156. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

164. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

172. “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

173. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

175. “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

176. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

185. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

187. “An addict never stops growing. Stupider.”

— William S. Burroughs

188. “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

189. “Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

191. “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

192. “Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.”

— William S. Burroughs

193. “Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.”

— William S. Burroughs

194. “I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins.”

— William S. Burroughs

195. “Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.”

— William S. Burroughs

196. “The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.”

— William S. Burroughs

197. “Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.”

— William S. Burroughs

198. “Anything that can be accomplished chemically can be accomplished in other ways.”

— William S. Burroughs

199. “Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.”

— William S. Burroughs

200. “Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.”

— William S. Burroughs