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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
Gimmicks
Birth
Longer
Death
Many
Much
Time
People
Gimmick

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Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
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Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
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The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.
William S. Burroughs
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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
William S. Burroughs
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You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.
William S. Burroughs
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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.
William S. Burroughs
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
William S. Burroughs
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I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.
William S. Burroughs
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No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.
William S. Burroughs
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I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man.
William S. Burroughs
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Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool! Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.
William S. Burroughs
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Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
William S. Burroughs
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I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.
William S. Burroughs
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As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
William S. Burroughs
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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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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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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.
William S. Burroughs
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Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.
William S. Burroughs
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Life is a vacation from two eternities.
William S. Burroughs
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Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.
William S. Burroughs