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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
Truth
Everything
Nothing
Permitted
True

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There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
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You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
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Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
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I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.
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Time is what death needs to grow people in.
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In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.
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I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.
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It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.
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Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
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Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.
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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.
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
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The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time.
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide.
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Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
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Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
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I prefer cats to people, for the most part. Most people aren't cute at all, and if they are cute they very rapidly outgrow it.
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Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.
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