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William S. Burroughs Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from William S. Burroughs


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A functioning police state needs no police.


Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.


There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.


Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.


Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.


The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.


This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.


Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller.


Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.


I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all.


Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.


Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.


Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.


The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.


Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.


Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.


In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.


Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?


Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.


Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.