Quotes by William S. Burroughs

Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because Im creating an imaginary — its always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.)

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesnt make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

You know a real friend?Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

Nobodys busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then dont worry about what theyre doing in South Korea and places like that. Its like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world whove got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes.

Oh be careful! There they go again! said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Dont just stand there and let the masters balls roll into the coal-bin!

I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.

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.

Whats with the serum?I dont know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The mans not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy...Or a joke.Precisely. Arty type...No principles...

Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you cant see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.

We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.

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

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because Im creating an imaginary — its always imaginary — world in which I would like to

The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.