William S. Burroughs Quotes - Page 15

The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. "Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin," as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion.

Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices; listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay

I meant that people will take anything that gives them a lift, whether it's alcohol or cocaine or the consciousness-expanding drugs or opiates. In Iran, until recently, they sold opium in shops legally, and they had 3,000,000 addicts in a population of 15,000,000. I don't believe that all those people were escaping from "complexes" or anything of the sort. They were simply exposed to it.

I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make.

Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

It's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect.

I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.

I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.

The Orgasmic Death Gimmick is rather complicated. It could be called the whole birth-death cycle of action, persuading people that birth and death are realities.

A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.

[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.

Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!

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.

Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.

The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.

I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.

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.

Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.

According to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself God and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescent image. The boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. This angered God, who was getting on in years. He decided it endangered his position as CREATOR. So he crept upon the boy and anaesthetized him and made Eve from his rib. Henceforth all creation of beings would process through female channels. But some of Adam's phantoms refused to let God near them under any pretext.

The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government.

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

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.