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William S. Burroughs quotes - page 5
In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker's face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate.
William S. Burroughs
Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.
William S. Burroughs
No job too dirty for a fucking scientist.
William S. Burroughs
Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
William S. Burroughs
No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
William S. Burroughs
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
William S. Burroughs
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
William S. Burroughs
The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
William S. Burroughs
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
William S. Burroughs
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
William S. Burroughs
Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
William S. Burroughs
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
William S. Burroughs
Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
William S. Burroughs
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
William S. Burroughs
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
William S. Burroughs
A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.
William S. Burroughs
Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.
William S. Burroughs
Youth rebellion is a world wide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I don't believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the establishment would like to believe. Millions of young people all over the world are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit.
William S. Burroughs
Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame.
William S. Burroughs
You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
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