William S. Burroughs Quotes

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it...

Language is a virus from outer space.

I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around t...

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol ...

And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking the...

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugl...

The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.

The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.

When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. – A user is a continual state ...

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they h...

Why are we here? We're here to go!

All political movements are basically anti-creative — since a political movement is a form of war. “...

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, becaus...

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, wo...

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of th...

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [...

May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the fr...

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue ...

There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some larg...

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don...

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around S...

A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forge...

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. ...

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real...

Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over ...

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective me...

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Be...

What's with the serum?"I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction fin...

The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-d...

No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advan...

two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabast...

Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom.

...Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible ...

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstor...

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorpor...

We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and th...

The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a to...

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan,...

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic s...

The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to f...

We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked i...

Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big bea...

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns...

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of wr...

Did I ever tell you about the manwho taught his asshole to talk?His whole abdomen would move up and ...

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such ...

You know a real friend?Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.

I don’t spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by...

You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.

A junkie spends half his life waiting.

A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvan...

Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkie...

A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do i...

Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary...

When you stop growing you start dying.

Perhaps all pleasure in only relief

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?The answer is that he usually ...

I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been n...

It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hou...

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?

Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.

I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel s...

But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.

All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someo...

I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners an...

I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuth...

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I'v...

Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, ...

Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience--any fucking thin...

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in sil...

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too pr...

As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary

Sodomy is as old as the human species.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implemen...

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to ...

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are fu...

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment ...

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on ...

Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a d...

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. ...

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, wo...

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he ...

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. ...

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we...