William Seward Burroughs II (1914–97) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century”. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
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I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: God
Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. ‘And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.’
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Authors & Writing
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief… Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol—pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Inspiration, Inspirational
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Space
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
Topics: Science, Physics
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: War
Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? “And here is my good big centipede!” If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
—William S. Burroughs
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: America
They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Scientists, Science
Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Humility
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: The Artist, Perception, Observation
Junk is the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Drugs
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Authors & Writing
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo—and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Sex
Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Disease, Advice
Language is a virus from outer space.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Language
Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Virtue
So 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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Quality, Cheating
I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Family
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Evil
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Grief, Grieving
I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.
—William S. Burroughs
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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Universe, The Universe
There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Sex
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: America
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Despair, Change
Junk is the ultimate merchandise. The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he degrades and simplifies the client.
—William S. Burroughs
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Words
A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Psychiatry
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader’s full attention.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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