William S. Burroughs Quotes

When you stop growing you start dying.

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

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

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.

Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

Language is a virus from outer space.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.

what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.

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.

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?

I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers.

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.

I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.

Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.

Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.

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

Too perfect to be sexually attractive.

NOTHING happens by coincidence.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.

Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.

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

There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.

Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.

Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

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.