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
Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.
Time is what death needs to grow people in.
When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.
NOTHING happens by coincidence.
I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.
Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
Language is a virus from outer space.
In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.