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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

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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
Factor
Factors
Constantly
Magic
Painting
Changed
Evocative
Must
Renewed
Always
Random

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In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.
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Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
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Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
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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 detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.
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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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As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
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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.
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What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.
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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.
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By the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge.
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Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
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For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.
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When you stop growing you start dying.
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There are no innocent bystanders.
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You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
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Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.
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The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.
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