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[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.

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
Many
Much
Time
People
Gimmick
Gimmicks
Birth
Longer
Death

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

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I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.
William S. Burroughs
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If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.
William S. Burroughs
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Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.
William S. Burroughs
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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
William S. Burroughs
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Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
William S. Burroughs
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Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
William S. Burroughs
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You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
William S. Burroughs
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Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.
William S. Burroughs
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The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
William S. Burroughs
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Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.
William S. Burroughs
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You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.
William S. Burroughs
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Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass.
William S. Burroughs
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Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot... Junkies have no shame... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido... The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.
William S. Burroughs
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Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.
William S. Burroughs
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Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.
William S. Burroughs
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Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
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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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.
William S. Burroughs
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He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
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