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The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

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
Poverty
Insanity
Broken
Moves
Minutes
Cells
Moving
Criminals
Virus
War
Minute
Viruses
Human
Police
Bureaucracy
Humans
Hatred
Symptoms
Men
Image
Cell

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For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.
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Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.
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I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
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A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.
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[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.
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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.
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Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.
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Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.
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The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
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He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells.
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A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.
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O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.
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Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
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I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . .
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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.
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We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse
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Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
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Too perfect to be sexually attractive.
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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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