William S. Burroughs Quotes

216 Sourced Quotes

The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time...

William S. Burroughs
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
I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.

William S. Burroughs
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
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
So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

William S. Burroughs