William Burroughs Quotations

Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.

Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is . . . LOVE.

My experience as an addict was very useful to me as writer: the whole syndrome of addiction and withdrawal and the extensions of that and other forms of addiction. It gave me a great deal of material. A writer can profit by something that someone else may not be able to profit from at all. Yet they were very disagreeable experiences. Very boring experiences.

No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls.

Never give succor to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit.

I dont care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony. People have goofed or we wouldn't be here.

My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space Age.

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.

It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.

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

We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that alien medium. The water we live in is Time. That alien medium we glimpse beyond time is Space. And that is where we are going.

Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers.

When I say madness I mean what I see in a nut house: beat, resigned, dim, diffuse, nowhere people. No fire no intensity no life. There is madness & madness if you want to stretch the word.

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.

To his secretary after a visit from Kurt Cobain, "There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns for no reason.

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ''I want to see the manager.''

Dream long and dream hard enoughYou will come to knowDreaming can make it so . . .

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.

I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.

If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and repeat the sequence. You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around your own apartment?

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom. Make no mistake; all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.

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.

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.

I don't make myself work. It's just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to know that there'll be no interruptions and I've got eight hours is exactly what I want -- yeah, just paradise.

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.

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.

The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.