Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
William S. Burroughs
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Products
Simply
Virtue
Happiness
Happy
Functioning
Product
Function
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink.
William S. Burroughs
The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.
William S. Burroughs
The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: A foot stamping on a human face forever! This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.
William S. Burroughs
A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
William S. Burroughs
Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is two people because it is a statement of the impasse of dualistic universe which he has created, they have created. I think that any dualistic universe ends in Nova. Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is a kind of God. A God of stupidity, cowardice, ugliness.
William S. Burroughs
Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.
William S. Burroughs
We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
William S. Burroughs
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
William S. Burroughs
Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
William S. Burroughs
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
William S. Burroughs
There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.
William S. Burroughs
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
William S. Burroughs
I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.
William S. Burroughs
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
Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.
William S. Burroughs
In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal.
William S. Burroughs
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
William S. Burroughs
Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
William S. Burroughs
The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
William S. Burroughs
No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.
William S. Burroughs
