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I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.

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
Kind
Virgins
Intend
Limitations
Establish
Ass
Limitation
Police
Detest
Place
Virgin

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After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.
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You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
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I do spend a great deal of time alone. I'm not very gregarious. I don't like parties and miscellaneous gatherings with no particular purpose. I think parties are largely a mistake. The bigger they are the more mistaken they are.
William S. Burroughs
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Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.
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It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
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If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.
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I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.
William S. Burroughs
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Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.
William S. Burroughs
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Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply . . . not . . . true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.
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If you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.
William S. Burroughs
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I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
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
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The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: A foot stamping on a human face forever! This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.
William S. Burroughs
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You know a real friend? Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.
William S. Burroughs
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I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.
William S. Burroughs
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Tell Allen I plead guilty to vampirism and other crimes against life. But I love him and nothing else cancels love.
William S. Burroughs
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If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.
William S. Burroughs
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Most all methods of capitol punishment are designed to inflict the maximum of humiliation - not attempts to prevent suicide.
William S. Burroughs
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Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.
William S. Burroughs
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If I knew how much you loved me, I would’ve shot you sooner.
William S. Burroughs