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Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.

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
Violence
Tangier
Left
Antisocial
Form
Robbery
Long
Proceed
World
Crude
Exactly
Places
Behavior

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I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
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I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are.
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Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.
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The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
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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.
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Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
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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.
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I started to write in about 1950 I was thirty-five at the time there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
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Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
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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.
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Too perfect to be sexually attractive.
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The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.
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I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make.
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Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any f...ing thing.
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Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.
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No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.
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Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.
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I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
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I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.
William S. Burroughs