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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.
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
Great
Capacity
General
Strength
Enigmatic
Greatest
Unpleasant
Sort
Confront
Anyone
Formula
Actually
Formulas
Matter
Weakness
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide.
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A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
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.
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We should exterminate all rational thought.
William S. Burroughs
Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.
William S. Burroughs
Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.
William S. Burroughs
Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
William S. Burroughs
I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.
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
I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.
William S. Burroughs
You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
William S. Burroughs
Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
I don't care if people hate my guts I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.
William S. Burroughs
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?
William S. Burroughs
I wouldn't be in your position - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us.
William S. Burroughs
Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.
William S. Burroughs
Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.
William S. Burroughs
There are no innocent bystanders.
William S. Burroughs
A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.
William S. Burroughs