William S. Burroughs Quotes

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

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There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

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Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

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

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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

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The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

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Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

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

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Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.

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I spit on the Christian God. When the White God arrived with the Spaniards, the Indians brought down fruit and corncakes and chocolate. The White Christian God proceeded to cut their hands off. He was not responsible for the Christian conquistadors? Yes, he was. Any God is responsible for his worshippers.

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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!

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Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

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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.

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I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

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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.

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What's with the serum?"
I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..."
Or a joke."
Precisely. Arty type...No principles...

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But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.

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The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

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Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.

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You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

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Cuando empezaron a decir que la literatura norteamericana no existía y que la inglesa era mala, perdí la compostura y les dije que la literatura española merecía estar en el retrete, colgada de un clavo junto a los catálogos atrasados de Montgomery Ward.

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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.

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We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.

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The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.

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You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

(Interview, The Paris Review)

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