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Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.

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
Others
Insight
Deficiency
Many
Data
Motives
Profession
Innate
Doctors
Masses
Mass
Remedy
Thoughts
Motive
Hope
Drawn
Feelings
Psychology
Ingesting

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I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.
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Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.
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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.
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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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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.
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How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - Your formula is disgusting and filthy? Not very far.
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(1) Never give anything away for nothing. (2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). (3) Always take everything back if you possibly can.
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All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.
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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.
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I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].
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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.
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells.
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So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
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Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.
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Piss off Satan and don't take me for dumber than I look.
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Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'
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What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.
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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.
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America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
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