William S. Burroughs Quotes

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

We should exterminate all rational thought.

Time is what death needs to grow people in.

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

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.

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.

Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.

It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.

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.

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?

Life is a vacation from two eternities.

I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.

If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.

A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.

Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.

as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

A functioning police state needs no police.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.

[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.

As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'

Shooting is my principal pastime.

Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.

Modern man has lost the option of silence.

No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.

Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply . . . not . . . true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.

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.

I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: "New Mexico, land of enchantment."

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.

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.

You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.

By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

"I wouldn't be in your position" - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us.

A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.

The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.