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

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Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.
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Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
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Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
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All political organizations tend to function like a machine, to eliminate the unpredictable factor of affect - emotion.
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I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
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The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.
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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.
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The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
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It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to destroy.
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A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
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Time is what death needs to grow people in.
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
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I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.
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(1) Never give anything away for nothing. (2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). (3) Always take everything back if you possibly can.
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Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.
William S. Burroughs
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If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.
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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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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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This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
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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.
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