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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
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
Around
Everything
Paranoia
Panic
Sudden
Realization
Alive
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.
William S. Burroughs
Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.
William S. Burroughs
A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
William S. Burroughs
A functioning police state needs no police.
William S. Burroughs
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
Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through.
William S. Burroughs
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'
William S. Burroughs
An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
William S. Burroughs
Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
William S. Burroughs
Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
William S. Burroughs
The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.
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
Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.
William S. Burroughs
A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.
William S. Burroughs
Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
William S. Burroughs
