William S. Burroughs Quotes - Page 6

Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.

If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.

Life is a vacation from two eternities.

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

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.

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.

A functioning police state needs no police.

Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.

Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.

The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes.

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

When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.

And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not.

Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.

I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.

Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.

Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.

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.

It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.

Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.

Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.