William S. Burroughs Quotes
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

204. “Shooting is my principal pastime.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

206. “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

207. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

212. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

216. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

218. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

220. “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

221. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

223. “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

224. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

226. “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

227. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

229. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

231. “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

232. “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

233. “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.”

— William S. Burroughs

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

240. “I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself?”

— William S. Burroughs

241. “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

242. “A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.”

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

244. “Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.”

— William S. Burroughs

245. “I was asked: “Why did you stop writing?” I would not know any more than I would know why I started writing. Try not to be as obtuse as you are.”

— 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. “Todos creemos al principio que podremos controlarlo. Luego dejamos de querer controlarlo.”

— William S. Burroughs

248. “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

249. “I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.”

— William S. Burroughs

250. “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