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My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.

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
Pervasive
Deadly
Cats
Cat
Saved
Ignorance
Relationship

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When you cut into the present the future leaks out.
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If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
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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.
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Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.
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The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.
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I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make.
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I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
William S. Burroughs
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He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells.
William S. Burroughs
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Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises. Don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.
William S. Burroughs
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Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.
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.
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Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.
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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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There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
William S. Burroughs
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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
William S. Burroughs
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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
William S. Burroughs
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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
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He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
William S. Burroughs
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In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations.
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