Quote

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.

William S. Burroughs

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Taken
Sticks
Bath
Hours
Flesh
Needles
Nothing
Hour
Baths
Every
Absolutely
Heroin
Years
Except
Removed
Clothes
Grey
Changed
Addiction
Wooden
Year
Stick
Needle

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

Image
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
William S. Burroughs
Image
As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
William S. Burroughs
Image
[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
William S. Burroughs
Image
So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Language is a virus from outer space.
William S. Burroughs
Image
I took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound.
William S. Burroughs
Image
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
Image
How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.
William S. Burroughs
Image
The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
William S. Burroughs
Image
I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.
William S. Burroughs
Image
I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?
William S. Burroughs
Image
The simplest questions are the most difficult.
William S. Burroughs
Image
The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children's children's children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image.
William S. Burroughs
Image
Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!
William S. Burroughs