William S. Burroughs
William S. 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth5 February 1914
CountryUnited States of America
Like Spain, I am bound to the past.
[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.
We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled - in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - unparalleled opportunity.
Too perfect to be sexually attractive.
No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.
You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk..
I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.
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.
[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.