Quote

The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers

William S. Burroughs

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Therefore
Dangerous
Control
System
Dreamers
Dream
Dreamer
Spontaneous
Happenings
Happening

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

Image
You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like.
William S. Burroughs
Image
How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
William S. Burroughs
Image
When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.
William S. Burroughs
Image
When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.
William S. Burroughs
Image
[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
William S. Burroughs
Image
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
William S. Burroughs
Image
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
Image
I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.
William S. Burroughs
Image
So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
William S. Burroughs
Image
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
William S. Burroughs
Image
All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
William S. Burroughs
Image
There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.
William S. Burroughs
Image
That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.
William S. Burroughs
Image
The word is now a virus.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Well, disgusting doesn't refer to the books but to the subjective reaction of the person making the complaint. I don't think that anything is disgusting per se. These words disgusting and filthy, etc., have prevented us from undertaking any scientific experimentation in sexual matters.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form.
William S. Burroughs