William S. Burroughs Quotes

American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer (1914–1997)

William Seward Burroughs II (5 February 1914 – 2 August 1997), more commonly known as William S. Burroughs, was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. He was a central member of the Beat Generation and an avant-garde author who influenced popular culture as well as literature. In 1984 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Willy a William Lee

Alternative Names: William Seward Burroughs II • William Lee • William Burroughs • William Seward Burroughs • Willy Lee

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It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.

In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.

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

Paranoia is just having the right information.

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

Cheat your landlord if you can — and must — but do not try to shortchange the Muse.

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

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

We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.

I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music,
sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to
produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae
to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any
more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself.
Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make
things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's
formulae.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.

William S. Burroughs Quotes

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