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
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments.
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
Open your mind and let the pictures out
He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.
Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.
In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.
Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
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.