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William S. Burroughs Quotes
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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
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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
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Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.
William S. Burroughs
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As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
William S. Burroughs
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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
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We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
William S. Burroughs
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time...
William S. Burroughs
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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
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I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
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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.
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So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
William S. Burroughs
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
William S. Burroughs
Born:
February 5, 1914
Died:
August 2, 1997
(aged 83)
Bio:
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
Known for:
Naked Lunch (1959)
Junkie (1953)
The Soft Machine (1961)
Cities of the Red Night (1981)
Nova Express (1964)
Most used words:
junk
people
life
human
control
writing
virus
matter
time
kill
eyes
mind
man
dream
love
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