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All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?
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
Writing
Cutting
Heard
Read
Fact
Words
Overheard
Artist
Collage
Facts
Collages
Else
Stealing
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
William S. Burroughs
When you cut into the present the future leaks out.
William S. Burroughs
If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
William S. Burroughs
This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
William S. Burroughs
We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
William S. Burroughs
Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
William S. Burroughs
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
William S. Burroughs
There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.
William S. Burroughs
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
William S. Burroughs
Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.
William S. Burroughs
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
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
William S. Burroughs
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
Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
William S. Burroughs
Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.
William S. Burroughs
There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.
William S. Burroughs
The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
I certainly wouldn't advocate anyone using drugs on a regular or habitual basis.
William S. Burroughs
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
William S. Burroughs
