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William S Burroughs
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KEYS (10k)
4 William S Burroughs
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
657 William S Burroughs
1:When you cut into the present, the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #KEYS
2:Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
~ William S Burroughs,#KEYS
3:Word-Armor
Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry. ~ William S Burroughs,#KEYS
4:I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Wouldn't you? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
2:and start west ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
3:I got the fear! ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
4:The word is now a virus. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
5:...subway brakes spit ozone... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
6:NOTHING happens by coincidence. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
7:Exterminate all rational thought ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
8:Shooting is my principal pastime. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
9:There are no innocent bystanders. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
10:Why are we here? We're here to go! ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
11:Like Spain, I am bound to the past. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
12:Perhaps all pleasure in only relief ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
13:Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
14:Language is a virus from outer space ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
15:Perhaps all pleasure is only relief. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
16:Language is a virus from outer space. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
17:A junkie spends half his life waiting. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
18:Sodomy is as old as the human species. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
19:Too perfect to be sexually attractive. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
20:When you stop growing you start dying. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
21:Life is a vacation from two eternities. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
22:Open your mind and let the pictures out ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
23:putting on a "b" production for a fruit ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
24:An addict never stops growing. Stupider. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
25:Never interfere in a girl and boy fight. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
26:Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
27:The Planet drifts to random insect doom. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
28:(1) Never give anything away for nothing. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
29:Nothing is true, everything is permitted. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
30:Cuando uno deja de crecer empieza a morir. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
31:Modern man has lost the option of silence. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
32:A functioning police state needs no police. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
33:A paranoid man is a man with all the facts. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
34:Nobody delivers on time except by accident. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
35:Time is what death needs to grow people in. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
36:We should exterminate all rational thought. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
37:A paranoid is someone who has all the facts. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
38:Like all pure creatures, cats are practical. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
39:Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
40:Death needs time for what it kills to grow in. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
41:Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
42:Paranoia is just having the right information. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
43:That old feeling is still in my leaking heart. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
44:The simplest questions are the most difficult. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
45:Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
46:Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
47:Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
48:Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
49:We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
50:By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
51:The face of evil is always the face of total need. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
52:He was a sad poison nice guy more poison than nice. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
53:I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
54:Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
55:When you cut into the present the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
56:When you cut into the present, the future leaks out ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
57:Shoot the bitch and write a book. That's what I did. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
58:Smash the control images. Smash the control machine. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
59:Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
60:The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
61:Artists to my mind are the real architects of change. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
62:In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
63:Lo psicotico è uno che ha scoperto come vanno le cose ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
64:O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
65:When you cut into the present, the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
66:The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
67:There's no place for impractical dreamers around here. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
68:In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
69:O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
70:The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
71:Brain eating birds patrol the low frequency brain waves. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
72:I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
73:In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
74:I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
75:Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
76:Piss off Satan and don't take me for dumber than I look. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
77:I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
78:It is more profitable to give wages than to receive them. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
79:The name's Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
80:when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
81:A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
82:Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
83:Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
84:Thou shalt not be such a shit, you don't know you are one. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
85:How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
86:I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
87:A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
88:Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
89:If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
90:Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
91:A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
92:[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
93:This planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
94:Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
95:How did we all get here? Spot of trouble in our old countries. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
96:No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
97:When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
98:Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
99:You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
100:As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.' ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
101:Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
102:Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
103:Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
104:Wenn scheissen Blut con Messer spritz dehn geht schon alles gut. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
105:Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
106:Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
107:The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
108:There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
109:Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
110:already, and the fuzz walks in on some newlyweds from Sioux Falls. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
111:Hemingway said:
'It don't come anymore.'
So where did it go? ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
112:Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
113:I am the cat who walks alone. And to me all supermarkets are alike. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
114:If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
115:It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
116:Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
117:Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
118:Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
119:Pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming or raising frogs. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
120:The aim of education is the knowledge, not the facts, but of values. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
121:You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
122:Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
123:No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
124:Now my inspiration but it won’t last and we’ll be just a photograph—i ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
125:El hombre occidental se exterioriza a si mismo a través de artefactos. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
126:The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
127:For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
128:here lies a stupid son of a bitch who tried to make Death a company cop ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
129:I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
130:Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
131:as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
132:I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
133:Sit down on your ass, or what's left of it after four years in the navy. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
134:The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
135:Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
136:Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
137:His face with lined with suffering in which his eyes did not participate. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
138:If you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
139:The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
140:A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
141:Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
142:I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac]. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
143:I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . . ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
144:Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
145:Once a problem has been identified, it is already too late for a solution. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
146:We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
147:Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
148:Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
149:The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
150:There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
151:But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
152:My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
153:And if you're doing a deal with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
154:Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
155:If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
156:Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
157:Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
158:Anything that can be accomplished chemically can be accomplished in other ways. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
159:Es poco probable que la vergüenza pueda darse en ausencia de la libido sexual... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
160:I certainly wouldn't advocate anyone using drugs on a regular or habitual basis. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
161:It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
162:We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
163:Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
164:The boys eat happily looking into each other’s eyes. Blood runs down their chins. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
165:There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
166:All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
167:As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
168:Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
169:Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
170:In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
171:The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
172:There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
173:Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
174:I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
175:The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
176:You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
177:Dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
178:Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
179:Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
180:I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
181:Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
182:I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
183:Todos creemos al principio que podremos controlarlo. Luego dejamos de querer controlarlo ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
184:You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
185:Your plan was unworkable then and useless now... Like da Vinci's flying machine plans... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
186:A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
187:Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
188:Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
189:Like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
190:Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
191:I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
192:You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
193:Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
194:The unworthies in power feel danger, like cows uneasily pawing the ground with a great "Moo. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
195:Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
196:Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
197:dream long enough and dream hard enough
you will come to know
dreaming can make it so... ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
198:Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
199:Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
200:Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
201:After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
202:After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
203:He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
204:Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
205:The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
206:Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
207:After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.' ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
208:Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
209:All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
210:Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
211:Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
212:Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
213:We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
214:If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
215:In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
216:The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
217:(A boat in lake.) I was afraid it would turn over at high speed.
Dreams less and less interesting. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
218:As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
219:Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
220:Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
221:There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
222:[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
223:Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any f...ing thing. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
224:The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
225:You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
226:Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
227:To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
228:A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
229:The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
230:Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
231:Successful control means achieving a balance and avoiding a showdown where all-out force would be necessary. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
232:When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
233:Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
234:If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
235:Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
236:The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
237:two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabaster straws ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
238:I was never tempted by any political program... I don't want to hear about the fucking masses and I never did. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
239:Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
240:The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
241:The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
242:The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
243:Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
244:Control never be a means to any practical end. It can never be a means to anything but more control… Like punk. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
245:How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
246:I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
247:The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
248:[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
249:If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
250:Perhaps why I am so uniquely terrible is simply that I represent total Dissent. Total Dissent. T.D. 19 + 4 = 23. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
251:When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
252:You're both mother fuckers." She was half asleep. Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
253:The beautiful disease and
The government falls
along the weed rooms
flesh along the weed government . . . ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
254:Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
255: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
256:Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
257:But there are higher stakes than youth or Latah, games where only two players in the world know what the stakes are. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
258:This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
259:Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
260:Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
261:Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
262:Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
263:I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
264:I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute,
& if they are cute they rapidly outgrow it ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
265:So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
266:The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
267:All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
268:A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
269:I would say for a great percentage of people, all they do is repeat their past. They really don't have a future at all. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
270:Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
271:If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
272: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
273:Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
274:He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
275:Know who I am? . . . 'Good Bye Mister' is my name . . . 'Wind and Dust' is my name . . . 'Never Happened' is my name . . . ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
276:I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
277:Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.' ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
278:The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
- pg. 41 ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
279:Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
280:He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
281:I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
282:Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
283:Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
284:The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
285:All you cat lovers, remember all the millions of cats mewling through the world's rooms lay all their hopes and trust in you. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
286: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, #NFDB
287:Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
288:I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
289: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
290:I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute at all, and if they are cute they very rapidly outgrow it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
291:You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
292:in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
293:You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
294:Cowboy: New York hood talk means kill the mother fucker wherever you find him. A rat is a rat is a rat is a rat. Is an informer. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
295:Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like 'raise,' letting someone know you are in the same line? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
296:I got up the next morning with morphine hangover. I poured myself a large glass of cold milk, which is an antidote for morphine. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
297:The figure had emerged from a lightless region where everything we have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
298:In many tenement apartments the front door opens directly into the kitchen. This was such an apartment and we were in the kitchen. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
299:Most people don't notice what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: for God's sake, keep your eyes open. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
300:A chaotic situation is always deliberately produced. Ask yourself who or what sort of creature could benefit from such a situation. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
301:Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
302:Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
303:America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
304:There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
305:How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
306:If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
307: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, #NFDB
308: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
309: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
310:I don't think anyone could write a completely honest autobiography. I am sure no one could bear to read it: My Past Was An Evil River. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
311:Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
312:Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
313:There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
314:A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
315:danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
316:How many years threaded on a needle of blood? Hands slack on lap he sits looking out at the winter dawn with the cancelled eyes of junk. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
317: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
318:Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
319:I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
320:I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
321:danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of
direct confrontation, you are immortal. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
322:The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
323:The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
324: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, #NFDB
325:The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
326: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, #NFDB
327:¡Mi culo vale más que el Louvre! Mis pedos son de ambrosía y cago zurullos de oro puro. Mi pija arroja diamantes blandos al sol de la mañana. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
328:Moor did not have tuberculosis or kidney trouble or undulant fever.He was sick with the sickness of death.Death was in every cell of his body. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
329:Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill! ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
330:He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
331:I was asked: “Why did you stop writing?” I would not know any more than I would know why I started writing. Try not to be as obtuse as you are. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
332: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
333:We can translate word and letter into color - [Arthur] Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote "words" can be read in silent color. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
334:You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
335:I tried more than once to tell you, to communicate what I know. You did not or could not listen. You can not show to anyone what he has not seen. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
336:Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
337:The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
338: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
339: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
340:I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: "New Mexico, land of enchantment." ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
341:The country with a low birth rate and low death rate will be hardest hit - and so the poor may indeed inherit the earth, because they're healthier. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
342:What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
343:In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
344:I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
345:What Hassan i Sabbah learned in Egypt was that paradise actually exists and that it can be reached. The Egyptians called it the Western Lands. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
346: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, #NFDB
347:Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
348:I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
349:In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
350:All the world's a gallows and we all play our parts, some are towel boys, others lewd doctors, most of us just dirty old men whimper at life's Glory Hole. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
351:He [William S Burroughs] has no patience for my kind of neurosis, I know... But since then I've been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
352:England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
353: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
354:What does she care for the atom bomb, the bedbugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh… Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
355:He remembers his fathers last words: “Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shit house. And swear to me you’ll never wear a lawman’s badge. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
356:Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
357:home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
358:«Me parece usted persona inteligente.» (Palabras de mal agüero siempre, muchacho... Cuando las oigas no debes preparar la huida, sino largarte de inmediato.) ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
359:The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
360: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
361:My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
362:The Orgasmic Death Gimmick is rather complicated. It could be called the whole birth-death cycle of action, persuading people that birth and death are realities. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
363: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
364:Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
365: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
366: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
367:I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
368:Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply . . . not . . . true, not in accord with the facts of human perception. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
369:For him, conscious intent was a form of prediction, and prediction is only possible when the status quo has reason to assume it will meet no significant opposition. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
370: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.' ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
371:A.J. is an agent like me, but for whom or for what no one has been able to discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
372:People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
373:The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
374: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
375:The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
376:Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience--any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
377:El comerciante de basura no vende su producto al consumidor, vende el consumidor a su producto. Él no mejora ni simplifica su mercancía. Degrada y simplifica al cliente. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
378: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
379:It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
380:"I wouldn't be in your position" - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
381:You don't sell a film by saying you won't show it. There may be secrets too horrible for a man to know and keep his own sanity but that won't go down in Hollywood, Mister. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
382:A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
383:Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy - always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups - the largest race is the Mongoloid group. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
384:People in bars are always claiming to be boxers, hoping thereby to ward off attack, like a black snake will vibrate its tail in leaves and try to impersonate a rattlesnake. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
385:The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell
by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy,
insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
386: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
387: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
388:There is a Senate and a Congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
389: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
390:I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
391:We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
392:When you have a decision to make, get all the factors in front of you and look at the situation as a whole. Just look. Don't try to decide. The answer will come to you. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
393:Word-Armor
Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
394:Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
395:When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. – A user is a continual state of shrinking and growing in his daily cycle of shot-need for shot completed. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
396:The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
397:They say only love can create, so who the fuck could love up a centipede? He's got more love in him than I got.
Now, killing a centipede makes me feel safer - like, one less. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
398:Brummel would rush upon his plate & gulp down a roast in such a revolting manner that the other guests complained they were nauseated and Brummel had to be fed in his room ………. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
399:Man is a political animal' said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
400: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, #NFDB
401: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, #NFDB
402:Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. "I don't have any whiskey," may be a fact but it is not a truth. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
403: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, #NFDB
404:When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
405: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, #NFDB
406: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
407: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
408: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
409:You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
410:The usual mixture of rooms and squares and streets that is the mark of the Land of the Dead. Streets lead into kitchens and bedrooms, so no area is completely private or completely public. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
411:[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
412: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
413: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
414:Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
415:I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
416: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? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
417: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
418:I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
419:In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
420:We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled - in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - unparalleled opportunity. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
421:Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: "My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning sunlight! ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
422:Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
423:The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. "Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin," as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
424:All the role models are being exposed and this is good because role models are shit. The quicker we exposed them the better. The whole concept of role models is frightful! You gotta make your own role. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
425: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
426: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
427: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
428:In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
429:The youth rebellion [1968] is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do not believe they will calm down ad be ad execs at thirty as the Establishment would like us to believe. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
430:Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
431:The ears were large, flaring forward, the eyes limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light: obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
432:The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
433:I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
434:Unquestionably, this drug is is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in Naked Lunch directly to the use of cannabis. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
435:Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
436:I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
437: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, #NFDB
438: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
439: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 ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
440:Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
441:If, after having been in someone's presence, you feel like you've lost a quart of plasma - avoid that presence. No one likes to hear the word "vampire" used around here... it's kind of bad for our public image. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
442:I took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
443:I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
444:Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
445:Cuando tienes el síndrome de abstinencia, tan intolerable resulta hacer lo que sea como no hacer nada. Un hombre podría morirse, simplemente, por no ser capaz de soportar la idea de permanecer dentro de su cuerpo ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
446:Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
447: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
448: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
449: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
450:My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
451:The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms - this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
452:Alguém disse que os gatos são o animal mais distante do modelo humano. Isso depende da linhagem de humanos a que você está se referindo e, é claro, a que gatos. Acho que, às vezes, os gatos são estranhamente humanos. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
453:A typical modern Puritan, she was able to believe in sin without believing in God. In fact, she felt there was something soft and sinful about believing in God. She rejected such indulgence like an indecent proposal. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
454:Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
455:I was lying there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about this uremic poisoning. A woman I'd known slightly in Texas had died of it after drinking a bottle of beer ever hour, night and day, for two weeks. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
456: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
457:The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
458:Con men don’t change, they break, shatter—explosions of matter in cold interstellar space, drift away in cosmic dust, leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside … ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
459:A Johnson honours his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy self-righteous trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when neeeded. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
460: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
461:A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
462:A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
463:I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
464:Only thing that can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats past and present.
Love? What is it?
Most natural painkiller what there is.
LOVE. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
465:For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
466:For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it: No context ... like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
467:I've seen villages in South America with no police whatever. Then the cops would arrive, then the sanitary inspectors, and before you know it they've got all the problems - crime, juvenile delinquency, the whole works - just like us. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
468:Do you realize how narrowly a fascist takeover in this country was headed off by Watergate? They all said as much quite frankly in all their boring memoirs. It is extremely important to keep track of these things, and remember. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
469:Given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need - any form of need - you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
470:I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
471: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, #NFDB
472:In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
473: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, #NFDB
474: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
475: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! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin! ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
476: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... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
477:I don’t spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowsers wand: ‘Junk here! ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
478:They are all stupid peasants, and the worst of all peasants are the so-called educated. These people should not only be prevented from learning to read, but from learning to talk as well. No need to prevent them from thinking; nature has done that. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
479: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
480:Cuando empezaron a decir que la literatura norteamericana no existía y que la inglesa era mala, perdí la compostura y les dije que la literatura española merecía estar en el retrete, colgada de un clavo junto a los catálogos atrasados de Montgomery Ward. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
481:You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
482: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
483:Panowie, rzucę wam perę: Mówiąc można zdobyć więcej informacji o drugiej osobie niż słuchając.
Wieprze pędzą do przodu, a profesor wypełnia koryto perłami...
- Nie jestem godzien jeść nóg tego kolosa, mówi najtłustszy wieprz.
- I Tak są gliniane. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
484:I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
485:There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
486: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
487:I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
488:To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
489:The old junky has found a vein... blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower... he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
490: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
491:The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children's children's children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
492:What's with the serum?"
I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..."
Or a joke."
Precisely. Arty type...No principles... ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
493:As I was walking past Tony Pastor's I saw Pat, the lesbian bouncer, throw a drunken young sailor out into the street. The sailor said, "That place is full of fucking queers." He swung at the air and nearly fell on his face, then he staggered away, muttering to himself. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
494:For instance, they [The Federal Narcotics Bureau ] give out that marijuana is a harmful and habit-forming drug, and it simply isn't. They claim that you can get addicted to opiates with one shot, and you can't. They over-estimate the physical bad effects, and so forth. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
495:England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
496:I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
497:He kisses the D.S.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost teeth "inna thervith". "Please Boss Man. I'll wipe your ass, I'll wash out your dirty condoms, I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose.... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
498:Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is two people because it is a statement of the impasse of dualistic universe which he has created, they have created. I think that any dualistic universe ends in Nova. Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is a kind of God. A God of stupidity, cowardice, ugliness. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
499:What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
500:Hayvan sevgisi gibi niteliksel değerleri niceliksel avantajla değiş tokuş etmeyi içeren bütün anlaşmalar sadece insanın yapabileceği en yanlış ve aşağılık şey olmakla kalmayıp, ayrıca aptalcadır da. Çünkü bunun size hiçbir faydası olmaz. Sizi siz yapan şeyi satmış olursunuz. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
501:After the shot he collapsed on the bed and lay there inert, but something was stirring in his spine from neck to the tail - and now pieces tore loose in the eggs and then a red, glistening head emerges in reeking yellow slime - and then the whole centipede crawling out quick. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
502:A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
503: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
504: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
505:The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
506:There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no solution. Just conflict. Only thing that can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats past and present. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
507:If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
508:He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. "Someday I am going to have things just like I want," he said to himself. "And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
509: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
510: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
511: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
512: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, #NFDB
513: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
514:Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
515:I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
516:Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
517:Well, "disgusting" doesn't refer to the books but to the subjective reaction of the person making the complaint. I don't think that anything is disgusting per se. These words "disgusting" and "filthy," etc., have prevented us from undertaking any scientific experimentation in sexual matters. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
518:Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises. Don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
519: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
520:The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
521:Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
522:If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
523:Usaba todo un ritual para fumar yerba y era muy puritano respecto de la droga, como la mayoría de los grifotas. Aseguraba que la yerba le ponía en contacto con campos gravitatorios supracelestes. Tenía opiniones formadas sobre todo: la ropa interior más sana, cuándo beber agua y cómo limpiarse el culo ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
524:And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
525: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… ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
526:A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
527: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
528:I spit on the Christian God. When the White God arrived with the Spaniards, the Indians brought down fruit and corncakes and chocolate. The White Christian God proceeded to cut their hands off. He was not responsible for the Christian conquistadors? Yes, he was. Any God is responsible for his worshippers. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
529:If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
530: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
531:For any species to change, if they are unable and are unwilling to do so - I might, for example, have suggested to the dinosaurs that heavy armor and great size was a sinking ship, and that they do well to convert to mammal facilities - it would not lie in my power or desire to reconvert a reluctant dinosaur. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
532: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
533:A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
534:To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.
from “It Is Necessary to Travel…, ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
535:Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency." - William S. Burroughs ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
536:But what does she care? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass, looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. What does she care for the atom bomb, the bedbugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh … Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
537:He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
538:There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some large goldfish I bought in a bait store. The cats are always trying to catch the fish, with no success. One time the white cat leapt for a frog across the pool. The frog dove in and the cat fell in. He is trouble-prone. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
539:he asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
540:I have learned the cellular stoicism that junk teaches the user. I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving. They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
541:In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh... Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
542:There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
543: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, #NFDB
544: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
545: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. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
546:All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
547: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
548:I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up, as though I did not have control over my actions. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
549:It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
550: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... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
551: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.
(Interview, The Paris Review) ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
552: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
553:I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
554:May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten. I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy. I look inside and there are her other four kittens.
"Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
555:It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat.
This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
556:It is inconceivable that Homo Sapiens could last another thousand years in present form. People of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners. And what do years mean, apart from human measurement and perception? Does time pass if there is no one there to register its passing? Of course not, since Time is a figment of human perception. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
557:The dichotomy of the gun-toting, substance-abusing queer seeking spiritual refuge might strike some as anticlimactic. But William Burroughs was not what he appeared to be to many of his fans. The work which so many revere as biblical texts in the church of addiction were always seen by the writer himself as cautionary rather than visionary. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
558: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
559:I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself? ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
560:Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
561:Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junktime and junkmetabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness anymore than you can escape from junk kick after a shot. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
562: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
563:Era una sera d'aprile, appena prima dell'imbrunire. Uscii nella veranda posteriore. All'estremità della veranda c'era il primo gatto grigio e accanto a lui c'era un grosso gatto bianco che non avevo mai visto. Il gatto bianco viene verso di me, strofinandosi contro le gambe del tavolo, piano, esitante. Alla fine si acciambella ai miei piedi, fa le fusa. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
564: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
565:The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
566:So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming "I got the fear!" and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant - mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters - and waited for the bus to town.
A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
567: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… ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
568:Escúchame ahora. Coge esta carta. Recorta las líneas. Reordénalas colocando la sección uno junto a la sección tres y la sección dos junto a la sección cuatro. Luego léelas en voz alta y oirás Mi Voz. ¿La voz de quién? Escucha. Recorta y reordena siguiendo cualquier combinación. Lee en voz alta. No puedo por menos que oírte. No lo pienses. No teorices. Pruébalo. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
569: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
570:Reagan is talking about getting back to the old versions, but that's just this old politician horseshit. They've been saying it for a hundred years: "Back to the virtues that made America great and can make America great again!" It's not to be taken seriously, of course. Biologically speaking, the only direction you can't go, is back! It's impossible. It's a law. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
571:Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
572: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
573: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
574:There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
575:Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.
~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
576: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. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
577:Consider the impasse of a one-God universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can't go anywhere, since He is already everywhere. He can't do anything, since the act of doing presupposes opposition. His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic, having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death, to keep his dying show on the road. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
578:The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
579:It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from a more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another-the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
580:After Bill got his shot, a little color crept into his face and he would become almost coy. It was a gruesome sight. I remember once he told me how he'd been propositioned by a queer who offered him twenty dollars. Bill declined, saying "I don't think you would be very well satisfied." Bill twitched his fleshless hips. "You should see me in the nude," he said. "I'm really cute. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
581:I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. 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. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
582:One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
583:The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
584:I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers... I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants-a body-after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death...Nobody can breath and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
585:There may be people who like centipedes... Personally, I would regard such an individual with deep suspicion. I have just petted my cat: "And how is this good little cat beast?" Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on his underbelly? "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, #NFDB
586:I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
587:The idea was that we would decide the order when we looked at the proofs. I remember Brion Gysin saying "Well, why change it? It's perfect the way it is, the way it came from the printer." Made one major change, that is, the first chapter that came from the printers, which would be the beginning, we moved to the end. The first chapter became the last chapter. There's no actual cutups in Naked Lunch. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
588:Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
589:I don't go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and I'd know there's a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn't go to sleep until I killed it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
590:In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
591:We're very near a certain point where money doesn't mean anything... They say: How much money is this going to cost? This is really a totally meaningless concept. Money determines less and less our reality. Money is not constant factor, it's simply a process dependent entirely on acceptance for its existence. We already see situations without money, and I think that we're coming closer and closer to it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
592:His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
593:The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
594:Nova Express begins with the blistering Last Words of the mysterious Hassan i Sabbah because time is running out: the book is not just a call-to-arms against those who brought us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mentioned several times, but a manifesto for global resistance against the 1 percent who run our planet like an alien colony.
--Oliver Harris, Introduction William S. Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
595:Good heavens, there are very detailed, and very arbitrary descriptions in all occult books that suggest how this is done and all this stuff you have to go through. I think myself that it's time for them to come out of the circle and into the street with all this. I said that in an introduction to the Necronomicon. I just don't follow all this absolutely arbitrary ritual of certain incenses and herbs and words and so on. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
596: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
597:A narcotics agent infiltrated the beatniks by writing bad poetry. WE are not bad writers but our purpose is ultimately the same: to expose and arrest Novia Criminals. In The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Novia Express i have shown who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. These books were written to expose and arrest criminals. Minutes to go. This is war to extermination. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
598:What originally established the band was cover songs like Not Fade Away. Then, later on, we got more well-known ones like Satisfaction, which you might say echoed the thinking of, well, any generation you care to name, including the present one. But we didn't set out on bits of paper that we were going to be the voice of a generation. The original aim of the Rolling Stones was to play blues. It wasn't even to play rock music. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
599:I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love-that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
600:I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love—that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
601:Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance as a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: "I don't give them time to die", he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. "Fucking undisciplined cells!" he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
602:we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. i do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and i don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
603:we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. i do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and i don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
604:I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners and in bars and restaurants. All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say "I don't take any shit!" and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
605:Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
606:God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
607:It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
608:Gilbert and George said: “But don’t you see? That’s how Bacon is. He is absolutely right to behave as he wants.” Not as he wants. As he has to behave. An artist must be open to the muse. The greater the artist, the more he is open to “cosmic currents.” He has to behave as he does. If he has “the courage to be an artist,” he is committed to behave as the mood possesses him. “That’s the man who booed Princess Margaret!” —the peasantry shrink back from his sulfurous glow. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
609:Lee finished his third drink and turned to Allerton. “I figure to go down to South America soon,” he said. “Why don’t you come along? Won’t cost you a cent.” “Perhaps not in money.” “I’m not a difficult man to get along with,” said Lee. “We could reach a satisfactory arrangement. What you got to lose?” “Independence.” “So who’s going to cut in on your independence? You can lay all the women in South America if you want to. All I ask is be nice to Papa, say twice a week. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
610: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
611:I could have been a successful bank robber, gangster, business executive, psychoanalyst, drug trafficker, explorer, bullfighter, but the conjecture of circumstances was never there. Over the years I begin to doubt if my time will ever come. It will come, or it will not come. There is no use trying to force it. Attempts to break through have led to curbs, near disasters, warnings. I cultivate an alert passivity, as though watching an opponent for the slightest sign of weakness. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
612:I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
613: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. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
614:It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music,
sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to
produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae
to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any
more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself.
Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make
things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's
formulae. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
615:Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
616:Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've 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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
617: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 Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
618:One morning in April, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago, when I lay in bed beside my mother, watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves. A mild degree of junk sickness always brought me the magic of childhood. It never fails, I thought, just like a shot; I wonder if all junkies score for this wonderful stuff. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
619:We’re not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours and we’re going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
620:I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
621:Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
622:According to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself God and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescent image. The boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. This angered God, who was getting on in years. He decided it endangered his position as CREATOR. So he crept upon the boy and anaesthetized him and made Eve from his rib. Henceforth all creation of beings would process through female channels. But some of Adam's phantoms refused to let God near them under any pretext. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
623:The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
624:We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate population at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
625:the use of torture. “I deplore brutality,” he said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
626:If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
627: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. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
628:The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is "the cleaner" or "the animal that cleans itself," described by the Sanskrit word Margaras, which means "the hunter who follows the track; the investigator; the skip tracer." The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can't shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
629:Here I sit with my three old cats, getting closer to eternity all the time, on a twine chair—(Van Gogh) and me too—and it gets very depressing. What can I do? I had high hopes. We all did. Remember just outside the Tangier Consulate: “Have you met the Skipper yet?” Later I did. And now no skipping, no transport anywhere, except to a cut-rate mortuary. Where were you when I wasn’t there? “Hound of Hell!!” screamed the Pop Star, and kicked the fink dog in the nuts. “Only decent thing I done.” “Forget the whole thing. I have.” Great gasp at this point. How much time? have I left? Not much it seems. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
630:After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
631:Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors 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, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
632:We have a new type of rule now. Not one man rule, or rule of aristocracy, or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who’ve reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident - inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
633:We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
634:In the first place, I think there's going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And 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? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
635:Lola’s was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola’s. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
636:I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy," direct. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
637:I just started reading the Doc Savage novels.
I don't think I ever encountered those. I read Black Mask; I remember Weird Tales and Amazing Stories--there were some very good ones in there, and some of them I've never been able to find. I used some of those in my own work, but I'd like to find the originals, but never could. Who was that guy [who wrote about] "the Old Ones"?
H.P. Lovecraft?
There was somebody else.
Arthur Machen?
He was another one, too. But anyway, Lovecraft was quite good and earnest. This place right by the--it's always in New England--where there's vile rural slums that stunk of fish because they're these half-fish people! It was great. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
638:A writer's will is the winds of dead calm in the Western Lands. Point way out he can start stirring of the sail. Writer, where are you going? To write. Here we are in texts already written on the sky. Where he doesn't need to write anymore. A slight seismic with the cat book. Always remember, the work is the mainsail to reach the Western Lands. The texts sing. Everything is grass and bushes, a desert or a maze of texts. Here you are ... never use the same door twice. Sky in all directions ... on the word for word. The word for word is word. The western sail stirs candles on 1920 country club table. Each page is a door to everything is permitted. The fragile lifeboat between this and that. Your words are the sails. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
639:THE COUNTY CLERK: "So there I was sitting in front of Jed's store over in Cunt Lick my peter standing up straight as a jack pine under my Levis just a-pulsin' in the sun ... Weell, old Doc Scranton walks by, a good old boy too, there's not a finer man in this valley than Doc Scranton. He's got a prolapsed asshole and when he wants to get screwed he'll pass you his ass on three feet of in-tes-tine ... If he's a mind to it he can drop out a piece of gut reaches from his office clear over to Roy's Beer Place, and it go feelin' around lookin' for a peter, just a-feelin' around like a blind worm ... So old Doc Scranton sees my peter and he stops like a pointin' dog and he says to me, `Luke, I can take your pulse from here. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
640:Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
641:A Nazi initiation into the upper reaches of the SS was to gouge out the eye of a pet cat after feeding the cat and cuddling it for a month. This exercise was designed to eliminate all traces of pity-poison and mold a full Übermensch. There is a very sound magical postulate involved: the practitioner achieves superhuman status by performing some atrocious, revolting, subhuman act. In Morocco, magic men gain power by eating their own excrement.
But dig out Ruski’s eyes? Stack bribes to the radioactive sky. What does it profit a man? I could not occupy a body that could dig out Ruski’s eyes. So WHO gained the whole world? I didn’t. Any bargain involving exchange of qualitative values like animal love for quantitative advantage is not only dishonorable, as wrong as a man can get, it is also foolish. Because YOU get nothing. You have sold your YOU. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
642: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. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, “Did you see him, that person who just walked by?” No, they didn't notice him. I had a very pleasant time on the train coming out here. I haven't traveled on trains in years. I found there were no drawing rooms. I got a bedroom so I could set up my typewriter and look out the window. I was taking photos, too. I also noticed all the signs and what I was thinking at the time, you see. And I got some extraordinary juxtapositions. For example, a friend of mine has a loft apartment in New York. He said, “Every time we go out of the house and come back, if we leave the bathroom door open, there's a rat in the house.” I look out the window, there's Able Pest Control. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
643:The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
644:...Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years.
And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
645:A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands—the lymph glands that is, of course—when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion—just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn't your script. I might well destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen—Bobo, we called her—who taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
646:While in general I avoid the use of torture - torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance - the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as the Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the Switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
647:A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain—I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would've destroyed myself. And a wise old queen—Bobo, we called her—taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see. Poor Bobo came to a sticky end - he was riding in the Duke Devanche's Hispano Suissa when his falling hemorrhoids blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe skin upholstry. Even the eyes and the brain went with a horrible "shlupping" sound. The Duke says he would carry that ghastly "shlup" with him to his mausoleum. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
648:Doctor Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that ... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second ...
"Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: `I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. `Fucking undisciplined cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
649:For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986
In hope he is still alive
Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts; thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison; thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger; thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot; thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes; thanks for the American Dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through; thanks for the KKK; for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches; for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces; thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers; thanks for laboratory AIDS; thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs; thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business; thanks for a nation of finks—yes, thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms; you always were a headache and you always were a bore; thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
650:The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii) ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
651: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... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
652:Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
653:The Ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.”
Top soul (Vicarious), and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren the Secret name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that's where Ren came in.
Second soul (Jambi), and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power. LIGHT. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.
Number three (Wings/Days) is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she or it is third man out...depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead.
Number four (The Pot) is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.
Number five (L.C., Lost Keys, Rosetta Stoned) is Ka, the double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands.
Number six (Instension) is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.
Number seven (Right in Two) is Sekhu, the Remains ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
654:This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, to Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, to Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who such the blood of men since they desire to become men, to the Lalussu, who haunt the places of men, to Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of Courage and Bravery, to Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire, to Ix Tab, Goddess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, twin brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook, the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins.
To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested….
NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
655:Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever -
"Don't let them see us. Don't tell them what we are doing -"
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth?
"For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out - "
"Not The Cancer Deal with The Venusians - "
"Not The Green Deal - Don't show them that - "
"Not The Orgasm Death - "
"Not the ovens - "
Listen: I call you all. Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it all back. Play it all pay it all play it all back. For all to see. In Times Square. In Picadilly.
"Premature. Premature. Give us a little more time."
Time for what? More lies? Premature? Premature for who? I say to all these words are not premature. These words may be too late. Minutes to go. Minutes to foe goal -
"Top Secret - Classified - For The Board - The Elite - The Initiates -
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth? These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies. Cowards who can not face your "dogs" your "gooks" your "errand boys" your "human animals" with the truth. Collaborators with Insect People with Vegetable People. With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever. To shit forever. For this you have sold out your sons. Sold the ground from unborn feet forever. Traitors to all souls everywhere. You want the name of Hassan i Sabbah on your filth deeds to sell out the unborn?
What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you; "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien Enemy imprisons "thee" in Time, In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
656:Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah," they will tell you. "He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?"
At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction—and history is fiction—I must say this:
"Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer—Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine—Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit—Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens—Stay out of the Garden of Delights—It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo—Throw back their ersatz Immortality—It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store—Flush their drug kicks down the drain—They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs—learn to make it without any chemical corn—All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
657:Did I ever tell you about the man
who taught his asshole to talk?
His whole abdomen would move up and down,
you dig, farting out the words.
It was unlike anything I ever heard.
Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound.
A sound you could smell.
This man worked for the carnival,you dig?
And to start with it was
like a novelty ventriloquist act.
After a while,
the ass started talking on its own.
He would go in
without anything prepared...
and his ass would ad-lib
and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teethlike...
little raspy incurving hooks
and started eating.
He thought this was cute at first
and built an act around it...
but the asshole would eat its way through
his pants and start talking on the street...
shouting out it wanted equal rights.
It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags.
Nobody loved it.
And it wanted to be kissed,
same as any other mouth.
Finally, it talked all the time,
day and night.
You could hear him for blocks,
screaming at it to shut up...
beating at it with his fists...
and sticking candles up it, but...
nothing did any good,
and the asshole said to him...
"It is you who will shut up
in the end, not me...
"because we don't need you
around here anymore.
I can talk and eat and shit."
After that, he began waking up
in the morning with transparentjelly...
like a tadpole's tail
all over his mouth.
He would tear it off his mouth
and the pieces would stick to his hands...
like burning gasoline jelly
and grow there.
So, finally, his mouth sealed over...
and the whole head...
would have amputated spontaneously
except for the eyes, you dig?
That's the one thing
that the asshole couldn't do was see.
It needed the eyes.
Nerve connections were blocked...
and infiltrated and atrophied.
So, the brain couldn't
give orders anymore.
It was trapped inside the skull...
sealed off.
For a while, you could see...
the silent, helpless suffering
of the brain behind the eyes.
And then finally
the brain must have died...
because the eyes went out...
and there was no more feeling in them
than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
658:Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.
This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.
This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”
“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”
After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk. ~ William S Burroughs,#NFDB
William S. Burroughs ::: Born: February 5, 1914; Died: August 2, 1997; Occupation: Novelist;
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