William S. Burroughs

Writer

1914-02-05

Quotes by William S. Burroughs

• How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

  Read quote

• We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.

  Read quote

• Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.

  Read quote

• The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

  Read quote

• Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

  Read quote

• Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.

  Read quote

• What's with the serum?I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy...Or a joke.Precisely. Arty type...No principles...

  Read quote

• Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Oh be careful! There they go again! said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin!

  Read quote

• Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes.

  Read quote

• The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

  Read quote

• You know a real friend?Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

  Read quote

• I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

  Read quote

• There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose —story— —plot— —continuity—... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

  Read quote

• You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.)

  Read quote

• when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

  Read quote

• Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.

  Read quote

• Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

  Read quote

• Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

  Read quote