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It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
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
Writer
Anyone
Contemplating
Living
Literary
Difficult
Indeed
Make
Trade
Advice
Career
Careers
More quotes by 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
I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.
William S. Burroughs
I wouldn't be in your position - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us.
William S. Burroughs
I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.
William S. Burroughs
Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.
William S. Burroughs
Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through.
William S. Burroughs
Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.
William S. Burroughs
Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
William S. Burroughs
If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.
William S. Burroughs
The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
William S. Burroughs
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
William S. Burroughs
Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.
William S. Burroughs
Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
William S. Burroughs
In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.
William S. Burroughs
You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
William S. Burroughs
What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.
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
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
