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Shooting is my principal pastime.

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
Shooting
Pastime
Principal

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

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Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.
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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.
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Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?
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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
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Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?
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If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.
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I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers.
William S. Burroughs
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You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
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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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Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
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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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When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.
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There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
William S. Burroughs
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Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.
William S. Burroughs
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Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.
William S. Burroughs
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Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.
William S. Burroughs
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Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
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[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.
William S. Burroughs