William S. Burroughs - Writing Quotes

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All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. "There's no place for impractical dreamers around here," that's what they always say. "Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around." "As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers." Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

William S. Burroughs
Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

William S. Burroughs
Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

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
There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.

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
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
Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.

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

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

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

William S. Burroughs