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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

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
Special
Use
Alcohol
Horror
Tend
National
Regard
Drug

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Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
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There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.
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I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
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A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.
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Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. I don't have any whiskey, may be a fact but it is not a truth.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
William S. Burroughs
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I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts.
William S. Burroughs
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Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.
William S. Burroughs
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Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
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The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
William S. Burroughs
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Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
William S. Burroughs
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Life is a vacation from two eternities.
William S. Burroughs
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In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.
William S. Burroughs
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The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government.
William S. Burroughs
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The nonconformist here may be beat down by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
William S. Burroughs
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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
William S. Burroughs
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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