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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's a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift's Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect.
William S. Burroughs
Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.
William S. Burroughs
Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
William S. Burroughs
There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.
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
Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
William S. Burroughs
A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.
William S. Burroughs
I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man.
William S. Burroughs
Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
William S. Burroughs
If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.
William S. Burroughs
Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy - always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups - the largest race is the Mongoloid group.
William S. Burroughs
I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
William S. Burroughs
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime.
William S. Burroughs
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'
William S. Burroughs
As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'
William S. Burroughs
There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
William S. Burroughs
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.
William S. Burroughs
Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
William S. Burroughs
