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A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.
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
Doe
Painter
Look
Originals
Transcribe
Looks
Original
Dispense
Listen
Fetish
Writer
Owns
Color
Lets
Forget
Originality
Words
Colors
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
William S. Burroughs
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
William S. Burroughs
The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.
William S. Burroughs
There are no innocent bystanders.
William S. Burroughs
Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.
William S. Burroughs
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
William S. Burroughs
Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.
William S. Burroughs
Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.
William S. Burroughs
I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.
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
If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
William S. Burroughs
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
William S. Burroughs
If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.
William S. Burroughs
You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
William S. Burroughs
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.
William S. Burroughs
Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.
William S. Burroughs
Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
William S. Burroughs
Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?
William S. Burroughs
Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you - in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to.
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
