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A functioning police state needs no police.
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
Policemen
Police
Dignity
Atheism
State
States
Government
Needs
Functioning
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
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O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.
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After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.
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[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.
William S. Burroughs
I wouldn't be in your position - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us.
William S. Burroughs
If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever.
William S. Burroughs
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
William S. Burroughs
When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.
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
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.
William S. Burroughs
If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.
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The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.
William S. Burroughs
Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.
William S. Burroughs
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
William S. Burroughs
what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.
William S. Burroughs
NOTHING happens by coincidence.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
William S. Burroughs
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
William S. Burroughs
Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
William S. Burroughs
