William Burroughs Quotes

I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question ''Why did you start using narcotics in the first place'' should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

America is not a young land it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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 Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody. . . . All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

I was new in the game and like all young thieves thought I had a license to steal. It didn't last.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

To put it country simple. Earth has a lot of things other folks might want, like the whole planet. And maybe these folks would like a few changes made.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

Junk is the ultimate merchandise. The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he degrades and simplifies the client.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen ''And here is my good big centipede'' If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

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 Louver A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol -- pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunity land crab, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.

- William Burroughs Visit FamousQuotes.com for more inspirational quotes