Quotes by William S. Burroughs

“Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.”

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function”

“The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. Its as psychological as malaria. Its a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.”

“Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.”

“Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.”

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

“Sometimes paranoias just having all the facts.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.”

“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didnt do it. I sure as hell wouldnt want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”

“The only possible ETHIC is to do what one wants to do.”

“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.”

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of whats going on.”

“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.”

“Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.”

“Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.”

“Im running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.”