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
This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.
I don't go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and I'd know there's a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn't go to sleep until I killed it.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.
Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.
The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.