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The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
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
American
Delineated
Composite
Composites
Negatives
Largely
Citizen
Citizens
Class
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I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
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We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled - in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - unparalleled opportunity.
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The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.
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Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.
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I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.
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Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.
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I like the idea of generalizing the narcotic thing by making it black meat addiction.
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Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
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No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
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Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
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Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?
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The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers
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Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.
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Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
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I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
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No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.
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Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.
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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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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
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