William S. Burroughs Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

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

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

William S. Burroughs
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
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
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
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
Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O. K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen.

William S. Burroughs
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
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
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

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

William S. Burroughs
I think that what we call love is a fraud perpetrated by the female sex, and that the point of sexual relations between men is nothing that we could call love, but rather what we might call recognition.

William S. Burroughs
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
As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

William S. Burroughs
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
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
Tea heads are gregarious, they are sensitive, and they are paranoiac. If you get to be known as a "drag" or a "bring down," you can't do business with them.

William S. Burroughs
Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.

William S. Burroughs
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
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.

William S. Burroughs
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
The young are an alien species. They won't replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence.

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

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
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
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 dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

William S. Burroughs
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