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Advice
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Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
-William S. Burroughs
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America
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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
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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
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Art
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Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
-William S. Burroughs
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Artist, The
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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
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Authors & Writing
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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, Remark, 1964. Quoted in: Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1977).
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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
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Control
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A functioning police state needs no police.
-William S. Burroughs
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Criticism
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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
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Despair
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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
-William S. Burroughs
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Dreams
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There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
-William S. Burroughs
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Drugs
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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
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Evil
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
-William S. Burroughs
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Family
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I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
-William S. Burroughs
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Gambling (Gaming)
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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
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God
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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
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Grief, Grieving
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
-William S. Burroughs
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Humility
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Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
-William S. Burroughs
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Insects
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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
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Inspirational
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Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief... Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol -- pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
-William S. Burroughs
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Invervention
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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
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Magic
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Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
-William S. Burroughs
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Mankind, Man
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.
-William S. Burroughs
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Obedience
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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.
-William S. Burroughs
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Psychiatry
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
-William S. Burroughs
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Books by and about William S. Burroughs