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Modern man has lost the option of silence.
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
Option
Silence
Modern
Lost
Men
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
A functioning police state needs no police.
William S. Burroughs
A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.
William S. Burroughs
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.
William S. Burroughs
Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
William S. Burroughs
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
William S. Burroughs
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
All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.
William S. Burroughs
If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.
William S. Burroughs
A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
William S. Burroughs
[Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me...he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
William S. Burroughs
[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.
William S. Burroughs
Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?
William S. Burroughs
He asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime.
William S. Burroughs
What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.
William S. Burroughs
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
Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
William S. Burroughs
I don't care if people hate my guts I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.
William S. Burroughs
Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
William S. Burroughs
I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink.
William S. Burroughs
Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.
William S. Burroughs
