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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

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
Permitted
True
Truth
Everything
Nothing

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

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Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
William S. Burroughs
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Given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need - any form of need - you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible.
William S. Burroughs
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I've seen villages in South America with no police whatever. Then the cops would arrive, then the sanitary inspectors, and before you know it they've got all the problems - crime, juvenile delinquency, the whole works - just like us.
William S. Burroughs
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Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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The youth rebellion [1968] is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do not believe they will calm down ad be ad execs at thirty as the Establishment would like us to believe.
William S. Burroughs
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The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.
William S. Burroughs
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Too perfect to be sexually attractive.
William S. Burroughs
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I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers.
William S. Burroughs
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Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.
William S. Burroughs
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When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.
William S. Burroughs
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Open your mind and let the pictures out
William S. Burroughs
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Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.
William S. Burroughs
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A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.
William S. Burroughs
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The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
William S. Burroughs
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How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
William S. Burroughs
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Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide.
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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Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
William S. Burroughs
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If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.
William S. Burroughs