American writer (1914-1997)
You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The Western Lands
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs
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
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
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
Painting and Guns
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
"Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs", The British Journal of Addiction, January 1957
When you stop growing you start dying.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
prologue, Junkie
The very rich are getting richer and all the others are going broke. The big holders are not shrewd or ruthless or enterprising. They don't have to say or think anything. All they have to do is sit and the money comes pouring in. You have to get up with the Big Holders or drop out and take any job they hand you.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Junkie
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
The Paris Review, Fall 1965
A functioning police state needs no police.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Naked Lunch
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
The Western Lands
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.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS
"The War Universe"
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
The Western Lands
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Last Words
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Naked Lunch
And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs
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
The Ticket That Exploded
A junky 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.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Junkie
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The Place of Dead Roads
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
Naked Lunch
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
The Adding Machine: Selected Essays