Quotes from William S. Burroughs

No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply . . . not . . . true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

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.

If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.

Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

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.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

Time is what death needs to grow people in.

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form.

The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time.

Time: a landing field! Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

Who was I? The stranger was footsteps in the snow a long time ago.

danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams. if you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.