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
Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so...
Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.
Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.
The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.
How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.
Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.
Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love-that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.
as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.