Top 300 William S. Burroughs Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Your plan was unworkable then and useless now... Like da Vinci’s flying machine plans...”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

204. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

206. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

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

— William S. Burroughs

219. “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

220. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

223. “Shooting is my principal pastime.”

— William S. Burroughs

224. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

228. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

230. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

232. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

234. “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

235. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

237. “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

238. “The aim of education is the knowledge, not the facts, but of values.”

— William S. Burroughs

239. “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

240. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

242. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

245. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

247. “The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat.”

— William S. Burroughs

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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