William s. burroughs quotes

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.

Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love-that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.

I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.

For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.

I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.

There are no innocent bystanders.

In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason.

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises. Don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.

I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

A functioning police state needs no police.

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?

Life is a vacation from two eternities.

When you cut into the present the future leaks out.

Modern man has lost the option of silence.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

Too perfect to be sexually attractive.

as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.

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.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it.

I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.

To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

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.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.

There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.

Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.

Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

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.

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.

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

No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

When you stop growing you start dying.

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute at all, and if they are cute they very rapidly outgrow it.

Open your mind and let the pictures out

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

The word is now a virus.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'

I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

Piss off Satan and don't take me for dumber than I look.

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

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.

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

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'

(1) Never give anything away for nothing. (2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). (3) Always take everything back if you possibly can.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

Paranoia is just having the right information.

Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.

Language is a virus from outer space.

What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.

Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

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

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

We should exterminate all rational thought.

Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

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.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

NOTHING happens by coincidence.

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.

One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

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.

God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.

in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen

When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

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

If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.