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Given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need - any form of need - you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible.

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
Certain
Rooms
Predict
Back
Leave
Equations
Need
Results
Factors
Needs
Situation
Absolutes
Possible
Absolute
Comprising
Known
Result
Drugstore
Given
Sick
Junkie
Form
Room
Equation

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I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.
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My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.
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The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers
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After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.
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No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
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I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.
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There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.
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For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.
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I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
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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.
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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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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.
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The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.
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There's no place for impractical dreamers around here.
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The simplest questions are the most difficult.
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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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Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
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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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Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
William S. Burroughs