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Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
William S. Burroughs
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William S. Burroughs
Age: 83 †
Born: 1914
Born: February 5
Died: 1997
Died: August 11
Essayist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
William Seward Burroughs II
Uilʹi︠a︡m Berrouz
William Lee
William Burroughs
Ouiliam Baroouz
William Seward Burroughs
Willy Lee
William S. (William Seward) Burroughs
Happiness
War
Without
Byproduct
Seek
Victory
Function
Conflict
Purpose
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.
William S. Burroughs
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
William S. Burroughs
Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.
William S. Burroughs
Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.
William S. Burroughs
Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
William S. Burroughs
danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.
William S. Burroughs
Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
William S. Burroughs
Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.
William S. Burroughs
[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
William S. Burroughs
Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.
William S. Burroughs
The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.
William S. Burroughs
My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.
William S. Burroughs
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
William S. Burroughs
If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
William S. Burroughs
It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.
William S. Burroughs
I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
William S. Burroughs
Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
William S. Burroughs
Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.
William S. Burroughs
