William Burroughs
William Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs IIwas an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, and his influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth5 February 1914
CitySt. Louis, MO
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.
I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.
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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
Never give succor to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit.
Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is . . . LOVE.
I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony. People have goofed or we wouldn't be here.
No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls.