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Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
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
Areas
Magic
Marginal
Black
Curses
Operates
Effectively
Casual
Curse
Effective
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
William S. Burroughs
Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
William S. Burroughs
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.
William S. Burroughs
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
William S. Burroughs
Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
William S. Burroughs
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are.
William S. Burroughs
Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass.
William S. Burroughs
The Orgasmic Death Gimmick is rather complicated. It could be called the whole birth-death cycle of action, persuading people that birth and death are realities.
William S. Burroughs
The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children's children's children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image.
William S. Burroughs
The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: A foot stamping on a human face forever! This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.
William S. Burroughs
Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
William S. Burroughs
You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.
William S. Burroughs
The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.
William S. Burroughs
Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.
William S. Burroughs
Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.
William S. Burroughs
I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.
William S. Burroughs
The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
William S. Burroughs
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
William S. Burroughs
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