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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
The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
William S. Burroughs
Shooting is my principal pastime.
William S. Burroughs
I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
William S. Burroughs
Addiction is a disease of exposure. Doctors and nurses, for instance, have a high addiction rate.
William S. Burroughs
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
William S. Burroughs
You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.
William S. Burroughs
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
William S. Burroughs
What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.
William S. Burroughs
The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers
William S. Burroughs
I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].
William S. Burroughs
If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one.
William S. Burroughs
I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.
William S. Burroughs
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
William S. Burroughs
The face of evil is always the face of total need.
William S. Burroughs
In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.
William S. Burroughs
You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.
William S. Burroughs
Look at these poisonous color maps where flesh trees grow from human sacrifices listen to these sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay
William S. Burroughs
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
William S. Burroughs
I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.
William S. Burroughs
Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.
William S. Burroughs
