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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.
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
Made
Conscious
Level
Beyond
Levels
Responsibility
Everyone
Extend
Everything
Intention
Must
Responsible
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
William S. Burroughs
There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.
William S. Burroughs
It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs
For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
William S. Burroughs
The Nova Mob doesn't have motives, as we understand motives. Sex is profoundly distasteful to a being of my mineral origin, as a leader of the Nova Mob, Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin, said on one occasion.
William S. Burroughs
[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
William S. Burroughs
As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
William S. Burroughs
The Planet drifts to random insect doom.
William S. Burroughs
Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.
William S. Burroughs
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
There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.
William S. Burroughs
[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.
William S. Burroughs
Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
William S. Burroughs
When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.
William S. Burroughs
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
William S. Burroughs
I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man.
William S. Burroughs
What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.
William S. Burroughs
Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.
William S. Burroughs
I started to write in about 1950 I was thirty-five at the time there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
William S. Burroughs
And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not.
William S. Burroughs