William S. Burroughs Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

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

William S. Burroughs
A functioning police state needs no police.

William S. Burroughs
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
The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need.

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

William S. Burroughs
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

William S. Burroughs
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
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.

William S. Burroughs
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
Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame.

William S. Burroughs
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
The step into space is a step into the unknown, a change as drastic as the transition from water to land.

William S. Burroughs
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
1. Never give anything away for nothing.
2. Never give more than you have to (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait).
3. Always take back everything if you possibly can.

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

William S. Burroughs
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
The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.

William S. Burroughs
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
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 to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.

William S. Burroughs
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
There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasant orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929.

William S. Burroughs
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
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?

William S. Burroughs
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
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