Quotes by William S. Burroughs

“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”

“Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.”

“I am getting so far out one day I wont come back at all.”

“Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.”

“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.”

“Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.”

“We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.”

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

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted”

“To his secretary after a visit from Kurt Cobain, Theres something wrong with that boy. He frowns for no reason.”

“The Pusher always gets it all back.”

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.

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.

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

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

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

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…

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

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

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