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Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool! Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

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
Make
Sympathy
Ill
Otherwise
Drivel
Paid
Bottomless
Fool
Terminal
Listen
Pits
Crazy
Firmly
Tell
Mentally

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Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.
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Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!
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America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
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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.
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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
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All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.
William S. Burroughs
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You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.
William S. Burroughs
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I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.
William S. Burroughs
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I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.
William S. Burroughs
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I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.
William S. Burroughs
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No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.
William S. Burroughs
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Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass.
William S. Burroughs
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I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
William S. Burroughs
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There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.
William S. Burroughs
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There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.
William S. Burroughs
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An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
William S. Burroughs
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There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.
William S. Burroughs
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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
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Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.
William S. Burroughs
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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.
William S. Burroughs