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When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.

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
Right
Miss
Think
Missing
Thinking
Close
People
Ones
Quite
Age
Known
Away
Antony

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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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I'm an old-fashioned person, and I don't like informers.
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I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
William S. Burroughs
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Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
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.
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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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Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'
William S. Burroughs
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Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
William S. Burroughs
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The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.
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.
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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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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No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.
William S. Burroughs
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My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly and pervasive ignorance.
William S. Burroughs
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I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].
William S. Burroughs
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The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
William S. Burroughs
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Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.
William S. Burroughs
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Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.
William S. Burroughs
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I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
William S. Burroughs
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Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.
William S. Burroughs