Quote

I've seen villages in South America with no police whatever. Then the cops would arrive, then the sanitary inspectors, and before you know it they've got all the problems - crime, juvenile delinquency, the whole works - just like us.

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
Problems
Cops
Seen
Cop
Whatever
Arrive
America
Village
Sanitary
Problem
Police
Delinquency
Whole
South
Inspectors
Would
Crime
Villages
Like
Works
Juvenile

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I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
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The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.
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Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.
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Dream long enough and dream hard enough you will come to know dreaming can make it so.
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In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
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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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The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
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The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.
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England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
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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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I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.
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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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In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations.
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In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.
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Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.
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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.
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The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments.
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A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.
William S. Burroughs