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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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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
Things
Accounts
Wrote
Fiction
Happen
Didn
Kerouac
Happens
Swiss
Writing
Jack
Made
Russian

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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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How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.
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You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.
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We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
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[Political movements] both favor alcohol and are against pot.
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I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
William S. Burroughs
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To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.
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I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers.
William S. Burroughs
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In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.
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Any unchecked impulse does, within the human body and psyche, lead to the destruction of the organism.
William S. Burroughs
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[Arab peoples] are stuck back thousands of years and they think they're going to get out with a TV set.
William S. Burroughs
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The nonconformist here may be beat down by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
William S. Burroughs
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I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.
William S. Burroughs
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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!
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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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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Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.
William S. Burroughs
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I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.
William S. Burroughs