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I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.

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
Trying
Something
Life
Klee
Like
Willingly
Danger
Create
Take
Real

More quotes by 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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I wouldn't be in your position - old saw. If there is any political move that I would advocate it would be an alliance between America and Red China, if they'd have us.
William S. Burroughs
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The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
William S. Burroughs
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They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.
William S. Burroughs
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As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'
William S. Burroughs
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A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.
William S. Burroughs
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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
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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I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.
William S. Burroughs
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Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'
William S. Burroughs
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If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.
William S. Burroughs
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An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
William S. Burroughs
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If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.
William S. Burroughs
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Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.
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.
William S. Burroughs
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The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.
William S. Burroughs
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In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.
William S. Burroughs
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We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse
William S. Burroughs
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Quien sabe? Not me. The older I get the less I sabe, the less wisdom, maturity and caution I have.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs