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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.

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
Haunting
Heartbreak
Melody
Fear
Never
Love
Mastered

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

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There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.
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A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
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I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.
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How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
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If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.
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Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.
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Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.
William S. Burroughs
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The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.
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The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.
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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
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The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.
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If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.
William S. Burroughs
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Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
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As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.
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I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.
William S. Burroughs
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I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.
William S. Burroughs
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You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
William S. Burroughs