William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch (1959)

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Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

William S. Burroughs
The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need.

William S. Burroughs
A functioning police state needs no police.

William S. Burroughs
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.

William S. Burroughs
Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

William S. Burroughs
The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.

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

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
If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one.

William S. Burroughs
You see control can never be a means to any practical end. … Control can never be a means to anything but more control … like Junk.

William S. Burroughs
Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.

William S. Burroughs
I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

William S. Burroughs
Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot... Junkies have no shame... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido... The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido...

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
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
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

William S. Burroughs
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

William S. Burroughs
Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit — Kid, it was tasty.

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
The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer.

William S. Burroughs
The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

William S. Burroughs
I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.

William S. Burroughs
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.

William S. Burroughs
The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch—a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

William S. Burroughs
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

William S. Burroughs
He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells...

William S. Burroughs
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

William S. Burroughs
If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

William S. Burroughs