Quote

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

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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
Existence
Precisely
American
Happenings
Moving
Happening
Dream
Therefore
Dreamers
America
Move
Wipe
Much
Dangerous
Dreamer
Control
Spontaneous
System
Nightmare

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If you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.
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Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.
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Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.
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Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
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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.
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Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'
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The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.
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Open your mind and let the pictures out
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I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
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Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
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I've seen villages in South America with no police whatever. Then the cops would arrive, then the sanitary inspectors, and before you know it they've got all the problems - crime, juvenile delinquency, the whole works - just like us.
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We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
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Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
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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.
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[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
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