William Burroughs Quotes

"It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido."

"My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space Age."

"In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen."

"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers."

"America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting."

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

"Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?"

"The face of evil is always the face of total need."

"Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention."

"The youth rebellion [1968] is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do not believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the Establishment would like us to believe."

"Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith."

"If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and repeat the sequence. You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around your own apartment?"

"How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity."

"Smash the control images. Smash the control machine."

"So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

"My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute."

"In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality."

"Language is a virus from outer space."

"Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective."

"Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole."