Top 300 William S. Burroughs Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?”

— William S. Burroughs

202. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

208. “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

209. “Man is a political animal’ said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men.”

— William S. Burroughs

210. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

212. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

215. “Shooting is my principal pastime.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

217. “The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection.”

— William S. Burroughs

218. “A chaotic situation is always deliberately produced. Ask yourself who or what sort of creature could benefit from such a situation.”

— William S. Burroughs

219. “What a horrible loutish planet this is. The dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. Hopeless rubbish.”

— William S. Burroughs

220. “Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.”

— William S. Burroughs

221. “The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”

— William S. Burroughs

222. “The nonconformist here may be “beat down” by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.”

— William S. Burroughs

223. “Time is what death needs to grow people in.”

— William S. Burroughs

224. “Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.”

— William S. Burroughs

225. “Hemingway said: ‘It don’t come anymore.’ So where did it go?”

— William S. Burroughs

226. “Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.”

— William S. Burroughs

227. “I don’t spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowsers wand: ‘Junk here!”

— William S. Burroughs

228. “It is inconceivable that Homo Sapiens could last another thousand years in present form. People of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners. And what do years mean, apart from human measurement and perception? Does time pass if there is no one there to register its passing? Of course not, since Time is a figment of human perception.”

— William S. Burroughs

229. “Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.”

— William S. Burroughs

230. “I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.”

— William S. Burroughs

231. “I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.”

— William S. Burroughs

232. “The world wasn’t a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.”

— William S. Burroughs

233. “I got up the next morning with morphine hangover. I poured myself a large glass of cold milk, which is an antidote for morphine.”

— William S. Burroughs

234. “I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.”

— William S. Burroughs

235. “I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.”

— William S. Burroughs

236. “No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.”

— William S. Burroughs

237. “I would say for a great percentage of people, all they do is repeat their past. They really don’t have a future at all.”

— William S. Burroughs

238. “All the world’s a gallows and we all play our parts, some are towel boys, others lewd doctors, most of us just dirty old men whimper at life’s Glory Hole.”

— William S. Burroughs

239. “You can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reaction by using a tape recorder than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture.”

— William S. Burroughs

240. “Sodomy is as old as the human species.”

— William S. Burroughs

241. “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.”

— William S. Burroughs

242. “We’re very near a certain point where money doesn’t mean anything... They say: How much money is this going to cost? This is really a totally meaningless concept. Money determines less and less our reality. Money is not constant factor, it’s simply a process dependent entirely on acceptance for its existence. We already see situations without money, and I think that we’re coming closer and closer to it.”

— William S. Burroughs

243. “I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up, as though I did not have control over my actions.”

— William S. Burroughs

244. “Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I’ve never been able to understand this sort of fear.”

— William S. Burroughs

245. “I tried more than once to tell you, to communicate what I know. You did not or could not listen. You can not show to anyone what he has not seen.”

— William S. Burroughs

246. “Sit down on your ass, or what’s left of it after four years in the navy.”

— William S. Burroughs

247. “People in bars are always claiming to be boxers, hoping thereby to ward off attack, like a black snake will vibrate its tail in leaves and try to impersonate a rattlesnake.”

— William S. Burroughs

248. “There is a Senate and a Congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction.”

— William S. Burroughs

249. “Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.”

— William S. Burroughs

250. “If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.”

— William S. Burroughs