Quotes from William S. Burroughs

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.

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

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.

The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.

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.

What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.

As an old junk pusher told me, 'Watch whose money you pick up.'

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'

I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.

If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.

I don't care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.

I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.

Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'

For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

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.

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.

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

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.