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'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.
In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.
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 world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.
We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.
I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence.
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.
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.