Quote

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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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
Must
Realizing
Ruthless
Courses
Mortality
Course
Chances
High
Survival
Chance
Rate
Mother
Realize
Nature
Second
Seems
Teacher

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He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
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Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image.
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I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
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Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.
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Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
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For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
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The Planet drifts to random insect doom.
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America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
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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.
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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
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I was thinking about New Mexico, and I rounded the corner in New York, and there was a New Mexico license plate: New Mexico, land of enchantment.
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Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
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Whatever happened to God's justice? I am convinced that God exist and God is one asshole.
William S. Burroughs
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Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
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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.
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Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.
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Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. I don't have any whiskey, may be a fact but it is not a truth.
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After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'
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I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
William S. Burroughs