William S. Burroughs quotes:

I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?

Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.

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

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.

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

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

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

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.

Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.

A functioning police state needs no police.

Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form.

No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.

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

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

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.

Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing.

I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.

No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.

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

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.

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.

The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.

If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.

Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.

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.

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.

Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot... Junkies have no shame... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido... The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido...

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...

Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.

What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

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.

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another. i could not have done what i have done as a writer had i been a gifted mathematician or physicist. honesty wrung out of him by pain, he cried out with a loud voice.

When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.

Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.

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

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

There are no innocent bystanders ...

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

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.

The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.

There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.

Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.

in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments.

Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.

First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother.

Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

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.

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

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.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.

Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.

Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes.

I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.

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.

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

Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. "There's no place for impractical dreamers around here," that's what they always say. "Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around." "As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers." Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

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 I'm creating an imaginary-it's always imaginary-world in which I would like to live.

I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers.

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.

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.

Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.

Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.

When you cut into the present the future leaks out.

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's 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.

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.

For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.

The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

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.

I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink...

Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.

Language is a virus from outer space.

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

Paranoia is just having the right information.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

We should exterminate all rational thought.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.