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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
Composite
Composites
Negatives
Largely
Citizen
Citizens
Class
American
Delineated
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
William S. Burroughs
Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
William S. Burroughs
Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.
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
Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
William S. Burroughs
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
William S. Burroughs
I took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound.
William S. Burroughs
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
William S. Burroughs
We can translate word and letter into color - [Arthur] Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote words can be read in silent color.
William S. Burroughs
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
Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.
William S. Burroughs
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
William S. Burroughs
The word is now a virus.
William S. Burroughs
There isn't a feeling you can get on drugs that you can't get without drugs.
William S. Burroughs
My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.
William S. Burroughs
Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.
William S. Burroughs
I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
William S. Burroughs
The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
William S. Burroughs
Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.
William S. Burroughs
You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.
William S. Burroughs
