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If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it.
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
Soft
Machine
Machines
Works
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
William S. Burroughs
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
William S. Burroughs
Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.
William S. Burroughs
Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
William S. Burroughs
I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence.
William S. Burroughs
England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
William S. Burroughs
Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
William S. Burroughs
Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.
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
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.
William S. Burroughs
As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
William S. Burroughs
For instance, they [The Federal Narcotics Bureau ] give out that marijuana is a harmful and habit-forming drug, and it simply isn't. They claim that you can get addicted to opiates with one shot, and you can't. They over-estimate the physical bad effects, and so forth.
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
Paranoia is just having the right information.
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
O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.
William S. Burroughs
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
William S. Burroughs
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
William S. Burroughs
A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
William S. Burroughs
The beautiful disease and The government falls along the weed rooms flesh along the weed government.
William S. Burroughs
