William.burroughs Quotes

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

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.

Exterminate all rational thought

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.

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

Most people don't notice what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: for God's sake, keep your eyes open.

Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.

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

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

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.

I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are.

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know.

There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.

Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.

I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love—that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.

Unquestionably, this drug is is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in Naked Lunch directly to the use of cannabis.

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.

We're very near a certain point where money doesn't mean anything... They say: How much money is this going to cost? This is really a totally meaningless concept. Money determines less and less our reality. Money is not constant factor, it's simply a process dependent entirely on acceptance for its existence. We already see situations without money, and I think that we're coming closer and closer to it.

The name's Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.

What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.

Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance as a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: "I don't give them time to die", he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. "Fucking undisciplined cells!" he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.

Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes.

A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling. But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people. Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…” And I say to them, “Fuck you!” One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it. When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... "Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin!

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained.

El comerciante de basura no vende su producto al consumidor, vende el consumidor a su producto. Él no mejora ni simplifica su mercancía. Degrada y simplifica al cliente.

Once a problem has been identified, it is already too late for a solution.

Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

Flannery O'Connor had a certain genius. I don't think John Updike has, or Norman Mailer or William Styron, all of whom are talented, but they don't exceed themselves in any way. Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.

Do you realize how narrowly a fascist takeover in this country was headed off by Watergate? They all said as much quite frankly in all their boring memoirs. It is extremely important to keep track of these things, and remember.

Nobody delivers on time except by accident.

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.

So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming "I got the fear!" and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant - mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters - and waited for the bus to town. A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead.

During this period of his life, Burroughs was seeking a physical utopia, a place where he could live and act as he wanted with interference from neither official state authority nor unofficial moral authority. In fact, he wanted to live in a place where he was out of place and where consequently he would be free.

The old junky has found a vein... blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower... he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.

He felt crude and detestable

Well, as one judge said to the other, “Be just and if you can’t be just be arbitrary.

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

Kesey was referred to as a kind of “hipster Christ,” “a modern mystic,” after the model of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. As

I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank Zappa” and “window onto a magical world.” He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

If you destroy the habitat of a species, if you kill off the food it depends on – milk parsley, in the case of the Swallowtail – then it is done for. William Burroughs had a nice phrase for it. It no longer has the ghost of a chance. Mind

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’ve 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.

The dichotomy of the gun-toting, substance-abusing queer seeking spiritual refuge might strike some as anticlimactic. But William Burroughs was not what he appeared to be to many of his fans. The work which so many revere as biblical texts in the church of addiction were always seen by the writer himself as cautionary rather than visionary.

Oh my god, this is so weird! I’m in space, talking to a giant insect. This is like ... I don’t know ... William Burroughs or something!

After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.

Gregory [Corso] made lists of books for me to read, told me the best dictionary to own, encouraged and challenged me. Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

This is the part they don’t tell you about in the movies. Or in On the Road. This is not rock ’n’ roll. You are not William Burroughs, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if Kurt Cobain was slumped over in an alleyway in Seattle the day Bleach came out. There is no junkie chic. This is not Soho and you are not Sid Vicious. You are not a drugstore cowboy and you are not spotting trains. You are not a part of anything—no underground sect, no counter-culture movement, no music scene, nothing. You have just been released from jail and are walking down Mission Street, alternating between taking a hit off a cigarette and puking, looking for coins on the ground so you can catch a bus as you shit yourself.

Good heavens, there are very detailed, and very arbitrary descriptions in all occult books that suggest how this is done and all this stuff you have to go through. I think myself that it's time for them to come out of the circle and into the street with all this. I said that in an introduction to the Necronomicon. I just don't follow all this absolutely arbitrary ritual of certain incenses and herbs and words and so on.

I dreamt that I took William Burrough’s penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, ‘You’re not a hero. You’re not a hero. You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.’ “ “How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?” …”I guess I’m nervous about my birthday.

There had been an attempt over the summer to mix that Camden Lock lot with this Caldwell lot, but Keisha Blake did not especially care for Baudelaire or Bukowski or Nick Drake or Sonic Youth or Joy Division or boys who looked like girls or vice versa or Anne Rice or William Burroughs of Kafka's Metamorphosis or CND or Glastonbury or the Situationists or Breathless or Samuel Beckett or Andy Warhol or a million other Camden things, and when Keisha brought a wondrous Monie Love 7-inch to play on Leah's hi-fi there was something awful in the way Leah blushed and conceded it was probably OK to dance to. They had only Prince left, and he was wearing thin.

All evening, my mother’s cheeks blushed a deep red that could be noticed even in the low light of the lamp. My books show me what it’s like to live in a reliable country where you flick on a switch and a bulb is guaranteed to shine and remain on, where you know that cars will stop at red lights and those traffic lights will not cease working a couple of times a day. How does it feel when a plumber shows up at the designated time, when he shows up at all? How does it feel to assume that when someone says she’ll do something by a certain date, she in fact does it? Compared to the Middle East, William Burroughs’s world or Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo is more predictable. Dickens’s Londoners are more trustworthy than the Lebanese. Beirut and its denizens are famously and infamously unpredictable. Every day is an adventure. This unsteadiness makes us feel a shudder of excitement, of danger, as well as a deadweight of frustration. The spine tingles momentarily and the heart sinks.

Moor sonreía a un espejo interior, una sonrisa sin rastros de calidez, pero no era una sonrisa fría; era una sonrisa sin sentido de la decadencia senil, la sonrisa que acompaña a una dentadura postiza, la sonrisa de un hombre envejecido y metido en la solitaria reclusión del exclusivo narcisismo.

The combination of David Cassidy and William Burroughs was undeniably weird.

When you're coming from a very mainstream household like we grew up in you have to find out for yourself about this other world of books and plays and music and drugs and sex - stuff that's always been there but you never saw much of except when you went to the library. You realise there's this secret society of coolness where there's a guy called William Burroughs who's a morphine addict and he writes these weird junkie books and he killed his wife when he was shooting the apple and you think 'Yeah, these are my people!

Language is a virus from outer space. WILLIAM BURROUGHS

I didn’t get around to reading the Lord of the Rings until after I saw Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations, which I thought did a much better job of telling the story than the books. I know the text is legendary and deeply beloved, but it is also slo-ow. It takes forever to get going. Frodo waits something like five years between discovering the ring and leaving the shire. Many characters get little or no introduction, important things happen in flashback or get relegated to the appendices, and the villain never even actually makes an appearance. The real central message isn’t about friendship or singsongy environmentalism, but is something that the late wife of William Burroughs could certainly appreciate: never trust a junkie. Conventional

Dylan remarked to biographer Robert Shelton, in 1978: “the myth of the starving artist is just that – a myth”.30 Genius can also be at the beck and call of the need for cold, hard cash. One thinks of Dostoyevsky producing the most extraordinary series of novels in order to settle debts, and of Charles Dickens’ mass-marketed outpouring of the most beautiful quality prose, at a time when it was valued by quantity, and paid by the wordage. As Samuel Johnson prosaically put it: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Both Shakespeare and Dylan prove to be canny operators in the world of commerce. William Burroughs remembered meeting a young Dylan who described himself as having “a knack for writing lyrics” and that he “expected to make a lot of money”.

rooms held photography and artwork by rock stars (David Byrne, Chris Stein, Alan Vega); photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (of Patti Smith) and Nan Goldin; works by the venerable (William Burroughs and Ray Johnson); and one gallery devoted to twenty artists associated with

because he began using the term “heavy metal” with equal vigor, perhaps derived from a lyric in Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” or from Beat writer William Burroughs’s character The Heavy Metal Kid from his early ’60s Nova Trilogy. A blogger named A. S. Van Dorston chronicled all the times Saunders used the term in his reviews in the early ’70s.11 In a 1970 Humble Pie review for Rolling Stone, he brandished the term as an insult, but by 1971 in Creem he was using it positively for Sir Lord Baltimore. The following year he used it in multiple reviews in Rolling Stone and Phonograph Record magazine for bands like Deep Purple and Uriah Heep (and even Fanny), dubbing Sabbath the “Dark Princes of Heavy Metal.” That year other writers like Dave Marsh in Creem started picking it up as well. By 1973 NME followed suit, as did Melody Maker in 1974.

Man was born in time. He lives and dies in time. Wherever he goes, he takes time with him and imposes time.

When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.

The restaurant was called Naked Lunch, after the novel by William Burroughs—“a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

In 2003 the Ccru undertook an intensive investigation into Kaye’s cryptic references to documented interconnections between William Burroughs, Peter Vysparov and Lemurian time travel.

Baudelaire, William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, the Beatles, and Hunter S. Thompson were as much the fathers of Saturday Night as Kovacs, Carson, Benny, and Berle. Dan Aykroyd called it Gonzo Television. They were video guerrillas, he’d say. Every show was an assault mission.

Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and thief and William Burroughs for the junky: articulate the thoughts and feelings of someone who had been there. The big difference is that they were white. Unlike them, and despite one Harvard study of Pimp as a ‘transgressive novel’, Slim was, and still is, marginalised as a writer. It’s ironic and indicative of the institutionalised racism of English-speaking society that someone whose influence on Western culture is now probably greater than any touted (white) writer of all postwar generations finds himself in this peculiar position. Literature, always the most culturally hegemonic art form, has basically shut Slim out, in a way the music industry tried (unsuccessfully) to do with black artists for years.

reporter asked William Burroughs, “Do you regret the period in your life when you were addicted?” He answered, “The point is a writer can profit by experiences which would not be advantageous or profitable to others. Because he’s a writer, he can write about it.

His opening words: “You look to me like a man of intelligence.” (Always ominous words, my boy…When you hear them stay not on the order of your going but go at once.)

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I always thought a punk was someone who took it up the ass.

Naked Lunch, after the novel by William Burroughs—“a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.