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I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.

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
Read
Ancient
Place
Western
Mailer
Also
Structure
Evenings
Soul
Seven
Lands
Great
Interested
Roads
Dead
Helpful
Land
Evening
Interest
Souls

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A paranoid is someone who has all the facts.
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If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.
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Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.
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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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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 study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
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I detest limitations of any kind, and intend to establish my ass some place where I am a virgin on the police blotter.
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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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A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.
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Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.
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Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
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If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.
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A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.
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Happinessis a byproduct of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
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Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.
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I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.
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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
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Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
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Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
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