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You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.

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
Ends
Anything
Mean
Never
Junk
Like
Practicals
Practical
Control
Means

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

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The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.
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Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply . . . not . . . true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.
William S. Burroughs
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The youth rebellion [1968] is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do not believe they will calm down ad be ad execs at thirty as the Establishment would like us to believe.
William S. Burroughs
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It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs
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Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?
William S. Burroughs
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The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time.
William S. Burroughs
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[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
William S. Burroughs
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I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].
William S. Burroughs
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The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.
William S. Burroughs
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I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.
William S. Burroughs
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The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.
William S. Burroughs
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He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.
William S. Burroughs
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In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.
William S. Burroughs
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The simplest questions are the most difficult.
William S. Burroughs
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Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.
William S. Burroughs
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Modern man has lost the option of silence.
William S. Burroughs
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I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.
William S. Burroughs
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You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
William S. Burroughs
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After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
William S. Burroughs
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Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'
William S. Burroughs