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It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.

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
Art
Magical
Used
Definite
Music
Arts
Writing
Remembered
Always
Result
Magic
Evocative
Painting
Obtain
Results
Origin

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The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.
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You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.
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when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
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Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your I is an illusion. You have to give something called an I before you speak of what the I believes.
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
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Paranoia is just having the right information.
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Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
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If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.
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danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.
William S. Burroughs
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No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.
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So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
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The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.
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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.
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Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
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You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.
William S. Burroughs
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O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.
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Shooting is my principal pastime.
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Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any f...ing thing.
William S. Burroughs
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To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.
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Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
William S. Burroughs