Quote

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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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
Fact
Endeavor
Facts
Committed
Cannot
Negative
Human
Alive
Humans
Goal
Avoidance
Take
Suffering
Ally
Like
Chance
Purely
Whether
Allies

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Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.
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Paranoia is just having the right information.
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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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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.
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If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
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Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
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To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.
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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.
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Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
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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.
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There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.
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A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
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How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
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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.
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We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
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I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: New Mexico, land of enchantment.
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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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Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.
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