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There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

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
Minding
Provocative
Business
Nothing

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

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In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.
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Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
William S. Burroughs
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Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
William S. Burroughs
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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
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The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.
William S. Burroughs
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Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.
William S. Burroughs
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For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.
William S. Burroughs
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We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse
William S. Burroughs
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How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
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.
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Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.
William S. Burroughs
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Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. I don't have any whiskey, may be a fact but it is not a truth.
William S. Burroughs
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Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel.
William S. Burroughs
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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
William S. Burroughs
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The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
William S. Burroughs
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Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.
William S. Burroughs
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as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.
William S. Burroughs
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I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs