William S. Burroughs Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.

William S. Burroughs
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
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
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
The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.

William S. Burroughs
The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.

William S. Burroughs
All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.

William S. Burroughs
If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

William S. Burroughs
If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it.

William S. Burroughs
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
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
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
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
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
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
Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.

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
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
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
Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.

William S. Burroughs
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
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
Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.

William S. Burroughs
As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.

William S. Burroughs
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
We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.

William S. Burroughs
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
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
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
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