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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
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
Virtue
Happiness
Happy
Functioning
Product
Function
Products
Simply
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
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
I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.
William S. Burroughs
Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.
William S. Burroughs
The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
William S. Burroughs
First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother.
William S. Burroughs
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
William S. Burroughs
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
Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
William S. Burroughs
For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
William S. Burroughs
Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.
William S. Burroughs
Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your I is an illusion. You have to give something called an I before you speak of what the I believes.
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
How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
William S. Burroughs
When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.
William S. Burroughs
In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.
William S. Burroughs
Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
William S. Burroughs
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
William S. Burroughs
Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
William S. Burroughs
Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool! Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.
William S. Burroughs
And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not.
William S. Burroughs
