Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by William S. Burroughs (American Novelist)

William Seward Burroughs (1914–97) was an American writer of experimental novels. He is best known for Junkie (1953,) The Naked Lunch (1959,) and other writings that deal with life as a drug addict in a unique, surreal style.

Born into a wealthy family in St Louis, Missouri, Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. He traveled throughout the USA and Europe. While in New York in 1944, he became a heroin addict, and in 1953, he published Junkie, an account of this experience.

Burroughs’s novels The Naked Lunch (1959) and The Soft Machine (1961) established him as a leading figure of the Beat movement. He was interested in juxtaposing random ideas and observations.

In his later work, Burroughs was concerned with innovations in the novel form, such as the techniques of ‘cut-up’ and ‘fold-in,’ by which words and phrases are either cut out and pasted together or formed by cross-column reading.

Burroughs’s other works include The Experimentor (1960,) The Ticket that Exploded (1962,) The Yage Letters (1963, with Allen Ginsberg,) Dead Fingers Talk (1963,) Nova Express (1964,) The Wild Boys (1971,) Exterminator! (1973,) Ah, Pook is Here (1979,) Cities of the Red Night (1981,) and My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995.)

Eric Mottram wrote the biography William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (1971.) Howard Brookner made the documentary Burroughs (1983.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William S. Burroughs

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Magic

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

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

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

A functioning police state needs no police.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Police, Control

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Grief, Grieving

The face of evil is always the face of total need.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Evil

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

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Pleasure

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: Observation, The Artist, Perception

A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Psychiatry

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

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: Science, Scientists

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

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

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
—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

There couldn’t be a society of people who didn’t dream. They’d be dead in two weeks.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Dreams

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

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists

I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Family

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

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Psychiatry

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.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Humanity

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: Critics, Criticism

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

Language is a virus from outer space.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Language

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
—William S. Burroughs
Topics: Science

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: Physics, Science

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: The Universe, Universe

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