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
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ''I want to see the manager.''
My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space Age.
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?
I was new in the game and like all young thieves thought I had a license to steal. It didn't last.
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 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.
Never give succor to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit.
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.
Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony. People have goofed or we wouldn't be here.
To his secretary after a visit from Kurt Cobain, "There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns for no reason.
Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers.